BETWEEN WORLDS

AD 27,152

I

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

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

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

`She hasn’t got a daughter!’

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

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

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

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

`I know what Chandra is.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

`Without killing the woman?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

`You’re a priest.’

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

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

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

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

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

`No.’

`No?’

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

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

`Michael Poole.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

`Not like that. He’s here, on Base-‘

`478.’

`478. You people keep him locked up.’

`We do?’

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

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

II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

`My name is Futurity’s Dream.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Futurity said bluntly, `I need your help.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

`I wouldn’t dream of it, sir.’

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

III

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

What Poole wanted, it seemed, Poole got.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Futurity was puzzled by the question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He leaned forward. `Who did?’

`The troops of the new Kard.’

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

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

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

`You say you were born there?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

`You really have, sir,’ Futurity said.

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

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

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

`Yes.’

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

`Of course.’

`Then what-‘

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

`Who to?’

`Sharn. My daughter.’

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

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

`Who by?’

`The Ideocrats.’

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

`She wasn’t on Greyworld.’

`Then where?’

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

`In the black hole?’

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

`As some kind of Virtual representation?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They both looked at him sharply.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And when the Coalition fell, the faith was liberated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

`I know the type.’

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

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

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

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

`Ah. Like Mara’s world.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poole pointed. `What in Lethe is that?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poole glanced at Futurity questioningly. The swarming?

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

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

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

V

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

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

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

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

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

Poole’s eyes narrowed. `What else?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

`That they are,’ Poole said.

`What are they doing?’

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

She pointed. `Look. Those two are fighting.’

Futurity and the others crowded to the window to see. It was true. Two ships had come together in an obviously unfriendly way. Both lumbering kilometre-long beasts, they weren’t about to do anything quickly, but they barged against each other, withdrew, and then went through another slow-motion collision. As they spun and ground, bits of hull ornamentation were bent and snapped off, and the ships were surrounded by a pale cloud of fragments, detached spires and shields, nozzles and antennae and scoops.

`It’s a peculiar sort of battle,’ Futurity said. `They aren’t using any weapons. All they are doing is smashing up each other’s superstructure.’

`But maybe that’s the point,’ Poole said.

`So strange,’ Mara said again.

Captain Tahget blocked her way. `But,’ he said, `not so strange as the fact that you, madam, were able to smuggle a monopole bomb onto my ship.’

The mood immediately changed. Mara, obviously frightened, shrank back against Poole, coming so close she brushed against him, making his flank sparkle with disrupted pixels.

Poole said warningly, `Captain, you promised you wouldn’t interfere with her.’

Tahget held up his big hands. `And I will keep my word. Nobody will touch the bomb, or Mara here, and we’ll go through with our flight to Chandra as we agreed.’

`But,’ Poole said heavily, `you had an ulterior motive in getting her out here, despite your promises.’

`All right,’ Captain Tahget snapped. `I need some answers. I must know how she got us all into this situation.’

Futurity asked, `Why?’

Tahget barely glanced at him. `To stop it happening again.’ He glared at Mara. `Who helped you? Somebody must have. You’re nothing but a refugee from Chandra; you came to 478 with nothing. Who helped you smuggle a bomb on board? Who equipped you with the means to use it? And why? I know what you want - I don’t understand, but I’ve heard what you said. What I don’t know is what your benefactors want. And I need to know.’

She returned his stare defiantly. `I want to go back to my cabin.’

But Tahget wouldn’t back down. The stand-off was tense, and Futurity, his heart pumping, couldn’t see a way out.

Poole intervened. `Mara, it may be best to tell him what he wants to know.’

`But-‘

`Telling him who helped you will make no difference to you. You aren’t going to come this way again, are you? And I can see the other point of view. Captain Tahget is responsible for his ship.’ Mara hesitated, but Poole continued to reassure her. `I believe he’ll keep his word. Just tell him.’

She took a deep breath. `Her name is Ideator First Class Leen.’

Tahget growled, `Who?’

But Futurity was shocked. He knew the name: the person who had helped Mara set all this up was a priest belonging to the Guild of Virtual Idealism.

Poole’s jaw dropped when he heard this. `My own makers! How delicious.’

Mara began to explain how the Ideator had helped her smuggle the bomb and other equipment aboard, but Tahget waved her silent. `If that bunch of illusionists was involved, anything could have been done to us and we wouldn’t know it.’ His suspicious frown deepened. `And then, once you were aboard, you asked for Poole himself. So was that part of the scheme?’

`No,’ she insisted. `The Ideator did tell me Michael Poole had been reincarnated on 478. But it was my idea to ask for him, not hers.’

Poole shook his head. `I’m not part of this, captain, believe me. I’m a mere creature of the Idealists - rather like Mara here, I suppose.’

Now the Captain’s ferocious stare was turned on Futurity. `And you,’ Tahget snarled, his scar livid. `What do you have to do with it? The truth, now.’

Futurity, flustered, protested, `Why, nothing, Captain. You know why I was brought in - to negotiate with Mara. You asked for the Ecclesia’s help! And I don’t understand why you’re even asking me such a question. I’m an Engineer, not an Idealist.’

Tahget snorted. `But you’re all alike, you Guilds. All of you clinging to your petty worldlets, with your stolen fragments of the soldier’s faith, your saintly relics and your shrines!’

Futurity was shocked. `Captain - believe me, Engineers and Idealists would never cooperate on a scheme like this. It’s unthinkable.’ He hunted for the right word. `We may seem alike to you. But we are rivals.’

`Maybe that’s the point,’ Poole said smoothly. `Acolyte, I imagine the Idealists have their own flow-through of pilgrims, along with their money.’

`Yes, that’s true.’

`What, then, if Mara’s bomb goes off? What will be the impact on the Ecclesia’s trading?’

`We don’t think of it as trading but a duty to helpless-‘

`Just answer the question,’ Tahget growled.

Futurity thought it through. `It would be a disaster for us,’ he conceded. `A refugee makes her journey only once in her lifetime. She brings her children. If she can choose, nobody would come to a place so unsafe as to allow something like this to happen.’

`No more refugees with their meagre savings for you to cream,’ Poole said, watching Futurity’s reaction with a cold amusement. `No more pilgrims and their offerings. Your rivals would have struck a mighty economic blow, would they not?’

Tahget said, `My company certainly wouldn’t touch your poxy little globe with a gloved hand, acolyte. Perhaps we won’t anyhow.’ A vein throbbed in his forehead. `So we are all puppets of those illusionists. And there’s not one of them within light years, whose head I can crack open!’

Mara had listened to all this. Now she said, `None of this matters. What does matter is me, and my daughter.’

`And your bomb,’ said Poole softly.

`Take me back to my cabin,’ she said. `And don’t ask me to leave it again before we get to Chandra.’

With a curt nod, Tahget dismissed her.

Futurity went back to his own room. He was relieved the little crisis was over, but his cheeks burned with shame and anger that this whole incident had been set up to get at his own Ecclesia - that another Guild should be responsible - and it had taken Poole to see it, Poole, a Virtual designed by the Idealists themselves!

But as he thought it over, he did see how alike the two Guilds were. And, he couldn’t help wondering, if the Idealists were capable of such deception, could it be that his own Ecclesia would not be above such dirty tricks? It was all politics, as Poole would probably say, politics and money, and a competition for the grubby trade of refugees and pilgrims. Perhaps even now the Ecclesiasts were plotting manoeuvres just as underhand and unscrupulous against their rivals.

An unwelcome seed of doubt and suspicion lodged in his mind. To burn it out he took his data desk and began furiously to write out a long report on the whole incident for his Hierocrat.

But before he had completed the work he was disturbed again. This time it wasn’t Mara who was causing trouble for the crew, but Poole - who had gone missing.

Tahget met Futurity in the observation lounge.

Futurity said, `I don’t see how you can lose a Virtual.’

Tahget grunted. `We know he’s being projected somewhere. We can tell that from the energy drain. What we don’t know is where. He isn’t on the monitors. We’ve checked out all the permitted zones by eye. What’s he up to, acolyte?’

Once again Futurity found himself flinching from Tahget’s glare. `You know, Captain, the way you use your physical presence to intimidate me-‘

`Answer the question!’

`I can’t! I’m on this voyage because of Poole - believe me, I wish I wasn’t here at all - but I’m not his keeper.’

`Acolyte, if you’re hiding something …’

Futurity was aware of a shadow passing over him. He turned.

There was Poole.

He was outside the hull, standing horizontally with his feet on the window’s surface, casting a diffuse shadow into the lounge. He was dressed in a skinsuit, and he looked down at Futurity with a broad grin, easily visible through his visor. The Virtual rendition was good enough for Futurity to see the pattern on the soles of Poole’s boots. Behind him, entangled ships drifted like clouds.

Futurity gaped. `Michael Poole! Why - how-?’

`I can tell you how,’ Tahget said. He walked up to the window, huge fists clenched. `You hacked into your own software, didn’t you? You overrode the inhibiting protocols.’

`It was an interesting experience,’ Poole said. His voice sounded muffled to Futurity, as if he was in another room. `Not so much like rewriting software as giving myself a nervous breakdown.’ He held up a gloved hand. `And you can see I didn’t do away with all the inhibitions. I wasn’t sure how far I could go, what was safe. Futurity, I think it’s possible that if I cracked this visor, the vacuum would kill me just as quickly as it would kill you.’

Futurity felt an urge to laugh at Poole’s antics. But at the same time anger swirled within him. `Poole, what are you doing out there? You’re the only one Mara trusts. All you’re doing is destabilising a dangerous situation, can’t you see that?’

Poole looked mildly exasperated. `Destabilising? I didn’t create this mess, acolyte. And I certainly didn’t ask to be here, in this muddled century of yours. But given that I am here - what do I want out of it? To find out, that’s what. That’s all I ever wanted, I sometimes think.’

Tahget said, `And what did you go spacewalking to find out, Poole?’

Poole grinned impishly. `Why, Captain, I wanted to know about your Hairy Folk.’

Futurity frowned. `What Hairy Folk?’

Tahget just glared.

Poole said, `Shall I show him?’ He waved a hand. A new Virtual materialised beside him, hanging in the vacuum. Its fragmentary images showed shadowy figures scurrying through the ship’s corridors, and along those translucent access tubes that snaked between the intertwined ships.

At first they looked like children to Futurity. They seemed to run on all fours, and to be wearing some kind of dark clothing. But as he looked closer he saw they didn’t so much crawl as scamper, climbing along the tube using big hands and very flexible-looking feet to clutch at handholds. There was something odd about the proportions of their bodies too: they had big chests, narrow hips, and their arms were long, their legs short, so that all four limbs were about the same length.

`And,’ Futurity said with a shudder, ‘that dark stuff isn’t clothing, is it?’

For answer, Poole froze the image. Captured at the centre of the frame, clearly visible through an access tube’s translucent wall, a figure gazed out at Futurity. Though this one’s limbs looked as well-muscled as the others, it was a female, he saw; small breasts pushed out of a tangle of fur. Her face, turned to Futurity, was very human, with a pointed chin, a small nose, and piercing blue eyes. But her brow was a low ridge of bone, above which her skull was flat.

`A post-human,’ Futurity breathed.

`Oh, certainly,’ said Poole. `Evidently adapted to micro-gravity. That even-proportioned frame is built for climbing, not for walking. Interesting; they seem to have reverted to a body plan from way back in our own hominid line, when our ancestors lived in the trees of Earth. The forests have vanished now, as have those ancestors or anything that looked like them. But a sort of echo has returned, here at the centre of the Galaxy. How strange! Of course these creatures would have been illegal under the Coalition, as I understand it. Evolutionary divergence wasn’t the done thing in those days. But the Galaxy is a big place, and evidently it happened anyhow. She doesn’t look so interested in the finer points of the law, does she?’

Futurity said, `Captain, why do you allow these creatures to run around your ship?’

Poole laughed. `Captain, I’m afraid he doesn’t understand.’

Tahget growled, `Acolyte, we call these creatures “shipbuilders”. And I do not allow them to do anything - it’s rather the other way around.’

Poole said cheerfully, `Hence the ship’s name - Ask Politely!’

`But you’re the Captain,’ Futurity said, bewildered.

Poole said, `Tahget is Captain of the small pod which sustains you, acolyte, which I can see very clearly stuck in the tangle of the hull superstructure. But he’s not in command of the ship. All he does is a bit of negotiating. You are all less than passengers, really. You are like lice in a child’s hair.’

Tahget shrugged. `You insult me, Poole, but I don’t mind the truth.’

Futurity still didn’t get it. `The ships belong to these Builders? And they let you hitch a ride?’

`For a fee. They still need material from the ground - food, air, water - no recycling system is a hundred per cent efficient. And that’s what we use to buy passage.’

Poole grinned. `I pay you in credits. You pay them in bananas!’

The Captain ignored him. `We have ways of letting the Builders know where we want them to take us.’

`How?’ Poole asked, interested.

Tahget shuddered. `The Shipbuilders are nearly mindless. I leave that to specialists.’

Futurity stared at Poole’s images of swarming apes, his dread growing. `Nearly mindless. But who maintains the Ask Politely? Who runs the engines? Captain, who’s steering this ship?’

`The Hairy Folk,’ Poole said.

It was all a question of time, said Michael Poole.

`In this strange future of yours, it’s more than twenty thousand years since humans first left Sol system. Twenty thousand years! Maybe you’re used to thinking about periods like that, but I’m a sort of involuntary time traveller, and it appals me - because that monstrous interval is a good fraction of the age of the human species itself.

`And it’s more than enough time for natural selection to have shaped us, if we had given it the chance. The frozen imagination of the Coalition kept most of humanity in a bubble of stasis. But out in the dark, sliding between those islands of rock, it was a different matter: nobody could have controlled what was happening out there. And with time, we diverged.

`After the first humans had left Earth, most of them plunged straight into another gravity well, like amphibious creatures hopping between ponds. But there were some, just a fraction, who found it preferable to stay out in the smoother spaces between the worlds. They lived in bubble-colonies dug out of ice moons or comets, or blown from asteroid rock. Others travelled on generation starships, unsurprisingly finding that their ship-home became much more congenial than any destination planned for them by well-meaning but long-dead ancestors. Some of them just stayed on their ships, making their living from trading.’

`My own people did that,’ Futurity said. `So it’s believed. The first Engineers were stranded on a clutch of ships, out in space, when Earth was occupied. They couldn’t go home. They survived on trade for centuries, until Earth was freed.’

`A fascinating snippet of family history,’ Tahget said contemptuously.

Poole said, `Just think about it, acolyte. These Hairy Folk have been suspended between worlds for millennia. And that has shaped them. They have lost much of what they don’t need - your built-for-a-gravity-well body, your excessively large brain.’

Futurity said, `Given the situation, I don’t see how becoming less intelligent would be an advantage.’

`Think, boy! You’re running a starship, not a home workshop. You’re out there for ever. Everything is fixed, and the smallest mistake could kill you. You can only maintain, not innovate. Tinkering is one of your strongest taboos! You need absolute cultural stasis, even over evolutionary time. And to get that you have to tap into even more basic drivers. There’s only one force that could fix hominids’ behaviour in such a way and for so long - and that’s sex.’

`Sex?’

`Sex! Let me tell you a story. Once there was a kind of hominid - a pre-human - called Homo erectus. They lived on old Earth, of course. They had bodies like humans’, brains like apes’. I’ve always imagined they were beautiful creatures. And they had a simple technology. The cornerstone of it was a hand-axe: a teardrop-shape with a fine edge, hacked out of stone or flint. You could use it to shave your hair, butcher an animal, kill your rival; it was a good tool.

`And the same design was used, with no significant modification, for a million years. Think about it, acolyte! What an astonishing stasis that is - why, the tool survived even across species boundaries, even when one type of erectus replaced another. But do you know what it was that imposed that stasis, over such an astounding span of time?’

`Sex?’

`Exactly! Erectus used the technology, not just as a tool, but as a way of impressing potential mates. Think about it: to find the raw materials you have to show a knowledge of the environment; to make a hand-axe you need to show hand-eye coordination and an ability for abstract thought; to use it you need motor skills. If you can make a hand-axe you’re showing you are a walking, talking expression of a healthy set of genes.

`But there’s a downside. Once you have picked on the axe as your way of impressing the opposite sex, the design has to freeze. This isn’t a path to innovation! You can make your axes better than the next guy - or bigger, or smaller even - but never different, because you would run the risk of confusing the target of your charms. And that is why the hand-axes didn’t change for a megayear - and that’s why, I’ll wager, the technology of these spiky starships hasn’t changed either for millennia.’

Futurity started to see his point. `You’re saying that the Shipbuilders maintain their starships, as - as-‘

`As erectus once made his hand-axes. They do it, not for the utility of the thing itself, but as a display of sexual status. It’s no wonder I couldn’t figure out the function of that superstructure of spines and scoops and nozzles. It has no utility! It has no purpose but showing off for potential mates - but that sexual role has served its purpose and frozen its design.’

Futurity recalled hearing of another case like this - a generation starship called the Mayflower, lost beyond the Galaxy, where the selection pressures of a closed environment had overwhelmed the crew. Evidently it hadn’t been an isolated instance.

As usual Poole seemed delighted to have figured out something new. `The Ask Politely is a starship, but it is also a peacock’s tail. How strange it all is.’ He laughed. `And it would appal a lot of my old buddies that their dreams of interstellar domination would result in this.’

`You’re very perceptive, Michael Poole,’ the Captain said with a faint sneer.

`I always was,’ said Poole. `And a fat lot of good it’s done me.’

Futurity turned to the Captain. `Is this true?’

Tahget shrugged. `I wouldn’t have put it quite so coarsely as Poole. We crew just get on with our jobs. Every so often you have to let the Builders come to a gathering like this. They show off their ships, their latest enhancements. Sometimes they fight. And they throw those tubes between the ships, swarm across and screw their heads off for a few days. When they’ve worn themselves out, you can pass on your way.’

Futurity asked, ‘But why use these creatures and their peculiar ships? Look at the detour we have had to make, even though we have a bomb on board! Why not just run ships under human control, as we always have?’

Tahget sighed. `Because we have no choice. When the Coalition collapsed, the Navy and the state trading fleets collapsed with it. Acolyte, unless you are extremely powerful or wealthy, in this corner of the Galaxy a ship like this is the only way to get around. We just have to work with the Builders.’

Futurity felt angry. `Then why not tell people? Isn’t it a lie to pretend that the ship is under your control?’

Tahget blinked. `And if you had known the truth? Would you have climbed aboard a ship if you had known it was under the control of low-browed animals like those?’

Futurity stared out as the Shipbuilders swarmed excitedly along their access tubes, seeking food or mates.

VI

With the encounter at 3-Kilo apparently complete, the Ask Politely sailed back towards the centre of the Galaxy. To Futurity it was a comfort when the ship slid once more into the crowded sky of the Core, and the starlight folded over him like a blanket, shutting out the darkness.

But ships of the Kardish Imperium closed around the Ask Politely. Everybody crowded to the windows to see.

They were called greenships, an archaic design like a three-pronged claw. Part of the huge military legacy of the Galaxy-centre war, they had once been painted as green as their names - green, the imagined colour of distant Earth - and they had sported the tetrahedral sigil that had once been recognised across the Galaxy as the common symbol of a free and strong mankind. But all that was the symbology of the hated Coalition, and so now these ships were a bloody red, and they bore on their hulls not tetrahedrons but the clenched-fist emblem of the latest Kard.

Ancient and recycled they might be, but still the greenships whirled and swooped around the Ask Politely, dancing against the light of the Galaxy. It was a display of menace, pointless and spectacular and beautiful. The Politely crew gaped, their mouths open.

`The crew are envious,’ Futurity murmured to Poole.

`Of course they are,’ Poole said. `Out there, in those greenships - that’s how a human is supposed to fly. This spiky, lumbering beast could never dance like that! And this “crew” has no more control over their destiny than fleas on a rat. But I suppose you wouldn’t sign up even for a ship like this unless you had something of the dream of flying. How they must envy those Kardish flyboys!’

Futurity understood that while the Politely had fled across the Galaxy there had been extensive three-way negotiations between the Ideocracy, the Imperium and the Ecclesia about the situation on Politely. All parties had tentatively agreed that this was a unique humanitarian crisis, and everyone should work together to resolve it, in the interests of common decency. But Earth was twenty-eight thousand light years away, and the blunt power of the Kard, here and now, was not to be denied.

So, with its barnstorming escort in place, the ship slid deeper into the crowded sky. The whole formation made bold faster-than-light jumps, roughly synchronised. Soon they penetrated the Central Star Mass.

Futurity found Poole in the observation lounge, staring out at the crowded sky. The nearest stars hung like globe lamps, their discs clearly visible, with a deep three-dimensional array of more stars hanging behind them - stars beyond stars beyond stars, all of them hot and young, until they merged into a mist of light that utterly shut out any disturbing darkness.

Against this background, Poole was a short, sullen form, and even the Mass’s encompassing brilliance didn’t seem to alleviate his heavy darkness. His expression was complex, as always.

`I can never tell what you’re thinking, Michael Poole.’

Poole glanced at him. `That’s probably a good thing … Lethe, this is the centre of the Galaxy, and the stars are crowded together like grains of sand in a sack. It’s terrifying! The whole place is bathed in light - why, if not for this ship’s shielding we’d all be fried in an instant. But to you, acolyte, this is normal, isn’t it?’

Futurity shrugged. `It’s what I grew up with.’

He tried to summarise for Poole the geography of the centre of the Galaxy. The structure was concentric - `Like an onion,’ Poole commented - with layers of density and complexity centred on Chandra, the brooding supermassive black hole at the centre of everything. The Core itself was the Galaxy’s central bulge, a fat ellipsoid of stars and shining nebulae set at the centre of the disc of spiral arms. Embedded within the Core was the still denser knot of the Central Star Mass. As well as millions of stars crammed into a few light years, the Mass contained relics of immense astrophysical violence, expanding blisters left over from supernovas, and tremendous fronts of roiling gas and dust thrown off from greater detonations at the Galaxy’s heart. Stranger yet was the Baby Spiral, a fat comma shape embedded deep in the Mass, like a miniature galaxy with its own arms of young stars and hot gases.

And at the centre of it all was Chandra itself, the black hole, a single object with the mass of millions of stars. The Galaxy centre was a place of immense violence, where stars were born and torn apart in great bursts. But Chandra itself was massive and immovable, the pivot of vast astrophysical machineries, pinned fast to spacetime.

Poole was intrigued by Futurity’s rough-and-ready knowledge of the Core’s geography, even though the acolyte had never before travelled away from 478. `You know it the way I knew the shapes of Earth’s continents from school maps,’ he said. But he was dismayed by the brusque labels Futurity and the crew had for the features of the centre. The Core, the Mass, the Baby: they were soldiers’ names, irreverent and familiar. In the immense glare of the Core there was no trace of mankind’s three-thousand-year war to be seen, but those names, Poole said, marked out this place as a battlefield - just as much as the traces of complex organic molecules that had once been human beings, hordes of them slaughtered and vaporised, sometimes still detectable as pollutants in those shining clouds.

Something about the location’s complexity made Poole open up, tentatively, about his own experience: the Virtual’s, not the original.

`When I was made fully conscious the first time, it felt like waking up. But I had none of the usual baggage in my head you carry through sleep: no clear memory of where I had been when I fell asleep, what I had done the day before - even how old I was. The priests quizzed me, and I slowly figured out where I was, and even what I was. I was shocked to find out when I was. Let me tell you,’ said Poole grimly, `that was tougher to take than being told I was worshipped as a god.’

`You can remember your past life? I mean, Poole’s.’

`Oh, yes. I remember it as if I lived it myself. I’m told they didn’t so much programme me,’ said Poole wistfully, `as grow me. They put together as much as they could about my life, and then fast-forwarded me through it all.’

`So you lived out a computer-memory life.’

Poole said, `My memory is sharp up to a point. I remember my father Harry, who, long after he was dead, came back to haunt me as a Virtual. I remember Miriam - somebody I loved,’ he said gruffly. `I lost her in time long before I lost myself. But it’s all a fake. I remember having free will and making choices. But I was a rat in a maze; the truth was I never had such freedom.

`And the trouble is the records go fuzzy just at the point where my, or rather his, biography gets interesting to you theologians. What happened after I lost Miriam isn’t like a memory, it’s like a dream - a guess, a fiction somebody wrote out for me. Even to think about it blurs my sense of self. Anyhow I don’t believe any of it!

`So I was a big disappointment, I think. Oh, the priests kept on developing me. They would download upgrades; I would wake up refreshed, rebooted. Of course I always wondered if I was still the same me as when I went to sleep. But I was never able to answer the theologians’ questions about the Ultimate Observer, or my jaunt through the wormholes, or about what I saw or didn’t see at Timelike Infinity. I wish I could! I’d like to know myself.

`In the end they shut me down one last time. They promised me I’d wake up soon, as I always had. But I was left in my Virtual casket for a thousand years. The bastards. The next thing I saw was the ugly face of your Hierocrat, leaning over me.’

`Perhaps they did crucify you, in the end.’

Poole looked at him sharply. `You’ve got depths, despite your silly name, kid. Perhaps they did. What I really don’t understand is why they didn’t just wipe me off the data banks. Just sentimental, maybe.’

Futurity said, `Oh, not that.’ The Hierocrat in his hurried briefing had made this clear. `They’d worked too hard on you, Michael Poole. They put in too much. Your Virtual representation is now more information-rich than I am, and information density defines reality. You may not be a god. You may not even be Michael Poole. But whatever you are, you are more real than we are, now.’

Poole stared at him. `You don’t say.’ Then he laughed, and turned away.

Still the Ask Politely burrowed deeper into the kernel of the Galaxy.

VII

At last the Ask Politely, with its Kardish escort, broke through veils of stars into a place the crew called the Hole. Under the same strict guarantees as before, Poole brought Mara to the observation deck.

The ship came to a halt, suspended in a rough sphere walled by crowded stars. This was a bubble in the tremendous foam of stars that crowded the Galaxy’s centre, a bubble swept clean by a black hole’s gravity. Captain Tahget pointed out some brighter pinpoints; they were the handful of stars, of all the hundreds of billions in the Galaxy, whose orbits took them closest to Chandra. No stars could come closer, for they would be torn apart by Chandra’s tides.

When Futurity looked ahead he could see a puddle of light, suspended at the very centre of the Hole. It was small, dwarfed by the scale of the Hole itself. It looked elliptical from his perspective, but he knew it was a rough disc, and it marked the very heart of the Galaxy.

`It looks like a toy,’ Mara said, wondering.

Poole asked, `You know what it is?’

`Of course. It’s the accretion disc surrounding Chandra.’

`Home,’ Poole said dryly.

`Yes,’ Mara said. `But I never saw it like this before. The Kardish shipped us out in their big transports. Just cargo scows. You don’t get much of a view.’

`And somewhere in there-‘

`Is my daughter.’ She turned to him, and the washed-out light smoothed the lines of her careworn face, making her look younger. `Thank you, Michael Poole. You have brought me home.’

`Not yet I haven’t,’ Poole said grimly.

The Ask Politely with its escort swooped down towards the centre of the Hole. That remote puddle loomed, and opened out into a broad sea of roiling gas, above which the ships raced.

Infalling matter bled into this central whirlpool, the accretion disc, where it spent hours or weeks or years helplessly orbiting, kneaded by tides and heated by compression until any remnants of structure had been destroyed, leaving only a thin, glowing plasma. It was this mush that finally fell into the black hole. Thus Chandra was slowly consuming the Galaxy of which it was the heart.

Eventually Futurity made out Chandra itself, a fist of fierce light set at the geometric centre of the accretion disc, so bright that clumps of turbulence cast shadows light days long over the disc’s surface. It wasn’t the event horizon itself he was seeing, of course, but the despairing glow of matter crushed beyond endurance, in the last instants before it was sucked out of the universe altogether. The event horizon was a surface from which nothing, not even light, could escape, but it was forever hidden by the glow of the doomed matter which fell into it.

Poole was glued to the window. `Astounding,’ he said. `The black hole is a flaw in the cosmos, into which a Galaxy is draining. And this accretion disc is a sink as wide as Sol system!’

It was Mara who noticed the moistness on Poole’s cheeks. `You’re weeping.’

He turned his head away, annoyed. `Virtuals don’t weep,’ he said gruffly.

`You’re not sad. You’re happy,’ Mara said.

`And Virtuals don’t get happy,’ Poole said. `It’s just - to be here, to see this!’ He turned on Futurity, who saw anger beneath his exhilaration, even a kind of despair, powerful emotions mixed up together. `But you know what’s driving me crazy? I’m not him. I’m not Poole. It’s as if you woke me up to torture me with existential doubt! He never saw this - and whatever I am, he is long gone, and I can’t share it with him. So it’s meaningless, isn’t it?’

Futurity pondered that. `Then appreciate it for yourself. This is your moment, not his. Relish how this enhances your own identity - yours, uniquely, not his.’

Poole snorted. `A typical priest’s answer!’ But he fell silent, and seemed a little calmer. Futurity thought he might, for once, have given Poole a little comfort.

Tahget said grimly, `Before you get too dewy-eyed, remember this was a war zone.’ He told Poole how Chandra had once been surrounded by technology, a net-like coating put in place by beings who had corralled a supermassive black hole and put it to work. `The whole set-up took a lot of destroying,’ Tahget said evenly. `When we’d finished that job, we’d won the Galaxy.’

Poole stared at him. `You new generations are a formidable bunch.’

There were stars in the accretion disc. Tahget pointed them out.

The disc was a turbulent place, where eddies and knots with the mass of many suns could form - and, here and there, collapse, compress and spark into fusion fire. These stars shone like jewels in the murky debris at the rim of the disc. But doomed they were, as haplessly drawn towards Chandra as the rest of the disc debris from which they were born. Eventually the most massive star would be torn apart, its own gravity no match for the tides of Chandra. Sometimes you would see a smear of light brushed across the face of the disc: the remains of a star, flensed and gutted, its material still glowing with fusion light.

Some stars didn’t last even that long. Massive, bloated, these monsters would burst as supernovas almost as soon as they formed, leaving behind remnants: neutron stars - or even black holes, stellar-mass objects. Even Chandra couldn’t break open a black hole, but it would gobble up these babies with relish. When a black hole hit Chandra, so it was said, that immense event horizon would ring like a bell.

It was towards one of these satellite black holes that the Ask Politely now descended.

Dropping into the accretion disc was like falling into a shining cloud; billows and bubbles, filaments and sheets of glowing gas drifted upwards past the ship. Even though those billows were larger than planets - for the accretion disc, as Poole had noted, was as wide as a solar system itself - Futurity could see the billows churning as he watched, as if the ship was falling into a nightmare of vast, slow-moving sculptures.

The approach was tentative, cautious. Captain Tahget said the Shipbuilders were having to be bribed with additional goodies; the swarming creatures were very unhappy at having to take their ship into this dangerous place. This struck Futurity as a very rational point of view.

In the middle of all this they came upon a black hole.

They needed the observation lounge’s magnification features to see it. With twice the mass of Earth’s sun, it was a blister of sullen light, sailing through the accretion clouds. Like Chandra’s, the dark mask of its event horizon - in fact only a few kilometres across - was hidden by the electromagnetic scream of the matter it sucked out of the universe. It even had its own accretion disc, Futurity saw, a small puddle of light around that central spark.

And this city-sized sun had its own planet. `Greyworld,’ Mara breathed. `I never thought I’d see it again.’

This asteroid, having survived its fall into Chandra’s accretion disc, had been plucked out of the garbage by the Ideocrats and moved to a safe orbit around the satellite black hole. The worldlet orbited its primary at about the same distance as Earth orbited its sun. And Greyworld lived up to its name, Futurity saw, for its surface was a seamless silver-grey, smooth and unblemished.

To Mara, it seemed, this was home. `We live under the roof,’ Mara said. `It is held up from the surface by stilts.’

`We used to call this paraterraforming,’ Poole said. `Turning your world into one immense building. Low gravity lets you get away with a lot, doesn’t it?’

`The roof is perfectly reflective,’ Mara said. `We tap the free energy of the Galaxy centre to survive, but none of it reaches our homes untamed.’

`I should think not,’ Poole said warmly.

`It is a beautiful place,’ Mara said, smiling. `We build our houses tall; some of them float, or hang from the world roof. And you feel safe, safe from the violence of the galactic storms outside. You should see it sometime, Michael Poole.’

Poole raised his eyebrows. `But, Mara, your “safe” haven is about as unsafe as it could get, despite the magical roof.’

`He’s right,’ said Tahget. `This black hole and its orbital retinue are well on their way into Chandra. After another decade or so the tides will pull the planetoid free of the hole, and after that they will rip off that fancy roof. Then the whole mess will fall into Chandra’s event horizon, and that will be that.’

`Which is why Greyworld had to be evacuated,’ Futurity said.

`The latest Kard is known for her humanitarian impulses,’ Tahget said dryly.

Poole said, `All right, Mara, here we are. What now? Do you want to be taken down to Greyworld?’

`Oh, no,’ she said. `What would be the point of that?’ She seemed faintly irritated. `I told you, Michael Poole. My Sharn isn’t on Greyworld. She’s there.’ And she pointed to the glimmering black hole.

Tahget and his crew exchanged significant glances.

Futurity felt a flickering premonition, the return of fear. This journey into the heart of the Galaxy had been so wondrous that he had managed, for a while, to forget the danger they were in. But it had all been a diversion. This woman, after all, controlled a bomb, and now they approached the moment of crisis.

Poole drew him aside. `You look worried, acolyte,’ he murmured.

`I am worried. Mara is still asking for the impossible. What do we do now?’

Poole seemed much calmer than Futurity felt. `I always had a philosophy. If you don’t know what to do, gather more data. How do you know that what she wants is impossible?’ He turned to Tahget. `Captain, how close can you take us to the satellite black hole?’

Tahget shook his head. `It’s a waste of time.’

`But you don’t have any better suggestion, do you? Let’s go take a look. What else can we do?’

Tahget grumbled, but complied.

So the ship lifted away from Greyworld, and its retinue of Kardish greenships formed up once more. Mara smiled, as if she was coming home at last. But Futurity shivered, for there was nothing remotely human about the place they were heading to now.

Slowly the spiteful light of the satellite black hole drew closer.

`Acolyte,’ Poole murmured. `You have a data desk?’

`Yes.’

`Then start making observations. Study that black hole, Futurity. Figure out what’s going on here. This is your chance to do some real science, for once.’

`But I’m not a scientist.’

`No, you’re not, are you? You’re too compromised for that. But you told me you were curious, once. That was what drove you out of the farm and into the arms of the Ecclesia in the first place.’ He sighed. `You know, in my day a kid like you would have had better opportunities.’

Futurity felt moved to defend his vocation. `I don’t think you understand the richness of theological-‘

`Just get the damn desk!’

Futurity hurried to his cabin and returned with his data desk. It was the Ecclesia’s most up-to-date model. He pressed the desk to the observation lounge blister, and checked it over as data poured in.

`I feel excited,’ he said.

`You should,’ Poole said. `You might make some original discovery here. And, more important, you might figure out how to save all our skins, my Virtual hide included.’

`I’m excited but worried,’ Futurity admitted.

`That sounds like you.’

`Michael Poole, how can a human child survive in a black hole?’

Poole glanced at him approvingly. `Good; that’s the right question to ask. You need to cultivate an open mind, acolyte. Let’s assume Mara’s serious, that she knows what she’s talking about.’

`That she’s not crazy.’

`Open mind! Mara has implied - I think - that we’re not talking about the child in her physical form but some kind of download, like a Virtual.’

Futurity asked, `But what information can be stored in a black hole? A hole is defined only by its mass, charge and spin. You need rather more than three numbers to define a Virtual. But no human science knows a way to store more data than that in a black hole - though it is believed others may have done so in the past.’

Poole eyed him. `Others? …’ He slapped his own cheek. `Never mind. Concentrate, Poole. Then let’s look away from the hole itself, the relativistic object. We’re looking for structure, somewhere you can write information. Every black hole is embedded in the wider universe, and every one of them comes with baggage. This satellite hole has its own accretion disc. Maybe there …’

But Futurity’s scans of the disc revealed nothing. `Michael Poole, it’s basically a turbulence spectrum. Oh, there is some correlation of structure around a circumference, and over time tied into the orbital period around the black hole.’

`But that’s just gravity, the inverse square law, defined by one number: the black hole’s mass. All right, what else have we got?’ Inexpertly Poole tapped at a Virtual clone of Futurity’s desk. He magnified an image of the hole itself. It was a flaring pinprick, even under heavy magnification. But Poole played with filters until he had reduced the central glare, and had brought up details of the background sky.

A textured glow appeared. A rough sphere of pearly gas surrounded the black hole and much of its accretion disc, and within the sphere a flattened ellipsoid of brighter mist coalesced closer to the hole.

`Well, well,’ said Poole.

Futurity, entranced, leaned closer to see. `I never knew black holes had atmospheres! Look, Michael Poole, it is almost like an eye staring at us - see, with the white, and then this iris within, and the black hole itself the pupil.’

Tahget listened to this contemptuously. `Evidently neither of you has been around black holes much.’ He pointed to the image of the accretion disc. `The hole’s magnetic field pulls material out of the disc, and hurls it into these wider shells. We call the outer layers the corona.’

Futurity said, `A star’s outer atmosphere is also a corona.’

`Well done,’ said Tahget dryly. `The gas shells around black holes and stars are created by similar processes. Same physics, same name.’

Poole said, `And the magnetic field pumps energy into these layers. Futurity, look at this temperature profile!’

`Yes,’ said Tahget. `In the accretion disc you might get temperatures in the millions of degrees. In the inner corona’ - the eye’s `iris’ - `the temperatures will be ten times hotter than that, and in the outer layers ten times hotter again.’

`But the magnetic field of a spinning black hole and its accretion disc isn’t simple,’ Poole said. `It won’t be just energy that the field pumps in, but complexity.’ He was becoming more expert with the data desk now. He picked out a section of the inner corona, and zoomed in. `What do you make of that, Futurity?’

The acolyte saw wisps of light, ropes of denser material in the turbulent gases, intertwined, slowly writhing. They were like ghosts, driven by the complex magnetic fields, and yet, Futurity immediately thought, they had a certain autonomy. Ghosts, dancing in the atmosphere of a black hole! He laughed with helpless delight.

Poole grinned. `I think we just found our structure.’

Mara was smiling. `I told you,’ she said. `And that’s where my daughter is.’

VIII

It took a detailed examination of the structures in the black hole air, a cross-examination of Mara, input from the experienced Captain Tahget, and some assiduous searching of the ship’s data stores - together with some extremely creative interpolation by Michael Poole - before they had a tentative hypothesis to fit the facts about what had happened here.

Like so much else about this modern age, it had come out of the death of the Interim Coalition of Governance.

Poole said, `Breed, fight hard, die young, and stay human: you could sum up the Coalition’s philosophy in those few words. In its social engineering the Coalition set up a positive feedback process; it unleashed a swarm of fast-breeding humans across the Galaxy, until every star system had been filled.’ Poole grinned. `Not a noble way to do it, but it worked. And we did stay human, for twenty thousand years. Evolution postponed!’

`It wasn’t as simple as that,’ Futurity cautioned. `Perhaps it couldn’t have been. The Shipbuilders slid through the cracks. There were even rumours of divergences among the soldiers of the front lines, as they adapted to the pressures of millennia of war.’

`Sure.’ Poole waved a hand. `But these are exceptions. You can’t deny the basic fact that the Coalition froze human evolution, for the vast bulk of mankind, on epic scales of space and time. And by doing so, they won their war. Which was when the trouble really started.’

The heirs of the Coalition were if anything even more fanatical about their ideology and purpose than their predecessors had ever been. They had called themselves the Ideocracy, precisely to emphasise the supremacy of the ideas which had won a Galaxy, but of which everybody else had temporarily lost sight.

In their conclaves the Ideocrats sought a new strategy. Now that the old threat had been vanquished, nobody needed the Coalition any more. Perhaps, therefore, the Ideocrats dreamed cynically, a conjuring-up of future threats might be enough to frighten a scattered humanity back into the fold, where they would be brought once more under a single command - that is, under the Ideocrats’ command - just as in the good old days. Whether those potential threats ever came to pass or not was academic. The cause was the thing, noble in itself.

The Ideocrats’ attention focused on Chandra, centre of the Galaxy and ultimate symbol of the war. The great black hole had once been used as a military resource by the foe of mankind. What if now a human force could somehow occupy Chandra? It would be a hedge against any future return by the Xeelee - and would be a constant reminder to all mankind of the threat against which the Ideocracy’s predecessor had fought so long, and on which even now the Ideocracy was focused. A greater rallying cry could hardly be imagined; Ideocracy strategists imagined an applauding mankind returning gratefully to its jurisdiction once more.

But how do you send people into a black hole? Eventually a way was found. `But,’ Poole said, `they had to break their own rules …’

Far from resisting human evolution, the Ideocrats now ordered that deliberate modifications of mankind be made: that specifically designed post-humans be engineered to be injected into new environments. `In this case,’ Poole said, `the tenuous atmosphere of a black hole.’

`It’s impossible,’ said Captain Tahget, bluntly disbelieving. `There’s no way a human could live off wisps of superheated plasma, however you modified her.’

`Not a human, but a post-human,’ Michael Poole said testily. `Have you never heard of pantropy, Captain? This is your age, not mine! Evolution is in your hands now; it has been for millennia. You don’t have to think small: a few tweaks to the bone structure here, a bigger forebrain there. You can go much further than that. I myself am an example.

`A standard human’s data definition is realised in flesh and blood, in structures of carbon-water biochemistry. I am realised in patterns in computer cores, and in shapings of light. You could project an equivalent human definition into any medium that will store the data - any technological medium, alternate chemistries of silicon or sulphur, anything you like from the frothing of quarks in a proton to the gravitational ripples of the universe itself. And then your post-humans, established in the new medium, can get on and breed.’ He saw their faces, and he laughed. `I’m shocking you! How delicious. Two thousand years after the Coalition imploded, its taboos still have a hold on the human imagination.’

`Get to the point, Virtual,’ Tahget snapped.

`The point is,’ Mara put in, `there are people in the black hole air. Out there. Those ghostly shapes you see are people. They really are.’

`It’s certainly possible,’ Poole said. `There’s more than enough structure in those wisps of magnetism and plasma to store the necessary data.’

Futurity said, `But what would be the point? What would be the function of these post-humans?’

`Weapons,’ Poole said simply.

Even when Greyworld was ripped away and destroyed by Chandra’s tides, the satellite black hole would sail on, laden with its accretion disc and its atmosphere - and carrying the plasma ghosts that lived in that atmosphere, surviving where no normal human could. Perhaps the ghosts could ride the satellite hole all the way into Chandra itself, and perhaps, as the small hole was gobbled up by the voracious central monster, they would be able to transfer to Chandra’s own much more extensive atmosphere.

`Once aliens infested Chandra,’ Poole said. `It took us three thousand years to get them out. So the Ideocrats decided they were going to seed Chandra with humans - or at least post-humans. Then Chandra will be ours for ever.’

Captain Tahget shook his head, grumbling about ranting theorists and rewritings of history.

Futurity thought all this was a wonderful story, whether or not it was true. But he couldn’t forget there was still a bomb on board the ship. Cautiously, he said to Mara, ‘And one of these - uh, post-humans - is your daughter?’

`Yes,’ Mara said.

Tahget was increasingly impatient with all this. `But, woman! Can’t you see that even supposing this antiquated Virtual is right about pantropy and post-humans, whatever might have been projected into the black hole atmosphere can no more be your daughter than Poole here can be your son? You are carbon and water, it is a filmy wisp of plasma. Whatever sentimental ties you have, the light show in that cloud has nothing to do with you.’

`Not sentimental,’ she said clearly. `The ties are real, Captain. The person they sent into that black hole is my daughter. It’s all to do with loyalty, you see.’

The Ideocrats, comparative masters when it came to dominating their fellow humans, had no experience in dealing with post-humans. They had no idea how to enforce discipline and loyalty over creatures to whom `real’ humans might seem as alien as a fly to a fish. So they took precautions. Each candidate pantropic was born as a fully biological human, from a mother’s womb, and each spent her first fifteen years living a normal a life - normal, given she had been born on a tent-world in orbit around a black hole.

`Then, on her sixteenth birthday, Sharn was taken,’ Mara said. `And she was copied.’

`Like making a Virtual,’ Poole mused. `The copying must have been a quantum process. And the data was injected into the plasma structures in the black hole atmosphere.’ He grinned. `You can’t fault the Ideocrats for not thinking big! And that’s why there are people here in the first place - I mean, a colony with families - so that these wretched exiles would have a grounding in humanity, and stay loyal. Ingenious.’

`It sounds horribly manipulative,’ said Futurity.

`Yes. Obey us or your family gets it …’

Mara said, `We knew we were going to lose her, from the day Sharn was born. We knew it would be hard. But we knew our duty. Anyhow we weren’t really losing her. We would always have her, up there in the sky.’

`I don’t understand,’ groused the Captain. `After your daughter was “copied”, why didn’t she just walk out of the copying booth?’

`Because quantum information can’t be cloned, Captain,’ Poole said gently. `If you make a copy you have to destroy the original. Which is why young Futurity’s superiors were so agitated when I was transferred into this ship’s data store: there is only ever one copy of me. Sharn could never have walked out of that booth. She had been destroyed in the process.’

Futurity gazed out at the wispy black hole air. `Then - if this is all true - somewhere in those wisps is your daughter. The only copy of your daughter.’

Poole said, `In a deep philosophical sense, that’s true. It really is her daughter, rendered in light.’

Futurity said, `Can she speak to you?’

`It was never allowed,’ Mara said wistfully. `Only the commanders had access, on secure channels. I must say I found that hard. I don’t even know how she feels. Is she in pain? What does it feel like to be her now?’

`How sad,’ Poole said. `You have your duty - to colonise a new world, the strange air of the black hole. But you can’t go there; instead you have to lose your children to it. You are transitional, belonging neither to your ancestors’ world or your children’s. You are stranded between worlds.’

That seemed to be too much for Mara. She sniffed, and pulled herself upright. `It was a military operation, you know. We all accepted it. I told you, we had our duty. But then the Kard’s ships came along,’ she said bitterly. `They just swept us up and took us away, and we didn’t even get to say goodbye.’

Tahget glared. `Which is why you hijacked my ship and dragged us all to the centre of the Galaxy!’

She smiled weakly. `I’m sorry about that.’

Futurity held his hands up. `I think what we need now is to find an exit strategy.’

Poole grinned. `At last you’re talking like an engineer, not a priest.’

Futurity said, `Mara, we’ve brought you here as we promised. You can see your daughter, I guess. What now? If we take you to the planetoid, would you be able to talk to her?’

`Not likely,’ Mara said. `The Kardish troops were stealing the old Ideocracy gear even before we lifted off. I think they thought the whole project was somehow unhealthy.’

`Yes,’ said Poole. `I can imagine they will use this as a propaganda tool in their battle with the Ideocracy.’

`Pah,’ spat Tahget. `Never mind politics! What the acolyte is asking, madam, is whether you will now relinquish your bomb, so we can all get on with our lives.’

Mara looked up at the black hole, hesitating. `I don’t want to be any trouble.’

Tahget laughed bitterly.

`I just wish I could speak to Sharn.’

`If we can’t manage that, maybe we can send a message,’ said Michael Poole. He grinned, snapped his fingers, and disappeared.

And reappeared in his skinsuit, out in space, on the other side of the blister.

Captain Tahget raged, `How do you do that? After your last stunt I ordered your core processors to be locked down!’

`Don’t blame your crew, Captain,’ came Poole’s muffled voice. `I hacked my way back in. After all, nobody knows me as well as I do. And I was once an engineer.’

Tahget clenched his fists uselessly. `Damn you, Poole, I ought to shut you down for good.’

`Too late for that,’ Poole said cheerfully.

Futurity said, `Michael Poole, what are you going to do?’

Mara was the first to see it. `He’s going to follow Sharn. He’s going to download himself into the black hole air.’

Futurity stared at Poole. `Is she right?’

`I’m going to try. Of course I’m making this up as I’m going along. My procedure is untested; it’s all or nothing.’

Tahget snorted. `You’re probably an even bigger fool than you were alive, Poole.’

`Oh?’

`All this is surmise. Even if it was the Ideocracy’s intention to seed the black hole with post-humans, we have no proof it worked. There may be nothing alive in those thin gases. And even if there is, it may no longer be human! Have you thought of that?’

`Yes,’ Poole said. `Of course I have. But I always did like long odds. Quite an adventure, eh?’

Futurity couldn’t help but smile at his reckless optimism. But he stepped up to the window. `Michael Poole, please-‘

`What’s wrong, acolyte? Are you concerned about what your Hierocrat is going to do to you when you go home without his intellectual property?’

`Well, yes. But I’m also concerned for you, Michael Poole.’

Poole did a double-take. `You are, aren’t you? I’m touched, Futurity’s Dream. I like you too, and I think you have a great future ahead of you - if you can clear the theological fog out of your head. You could change the world! But on the other hand, I have the feeling you’ll be a fine priest too. I’d like to stick around to see what happens. But, no offence, it ain’t worth going back into cold storage for.’

Mara said, her voice breaking, `If you find Sharn, tell her I love her.’

`I will. And who knows? Perhaps we will find a way to get back in touch with you, some day. Don’t give up hope. I never do.’

`I won’t.’

`Just to be absolutely clear,’ said Captain Tahget heavily. `Mara, will this be enough for you to get rid of that damn bomb?’

`Oh, yes,’ said Mara. `I always did trust Michael Poole.’

`And she won’t face any charges,’ Poole said. `Will she, Captain?’

Tahget looked at the ceiling. `As long as I get that bomb off my ship - and as long as somebody pays me for this jaunt - she can walk free.’

`Then my work here is done,’ said Poole, mock-seriously. He turned and faced the black hole.

`You’re hesitating,’ Futurity said.

`Wouldn’t you? I wonder what the life expectancy of a sentient structure in there is … Well, I’ve got a century before the black hole hits Chandra, and maybe there’ll be a way to survive that.

`I hope I live! It would be fun seeing what comes next, in this human Galaxy. For sure it won’t be like what went before. You know, it’s a dangerous precedent, this deliberate speciation: after an age of unity, will we now live through an era of bifurcation, as mankind purposefully splits and splits again?’ He turned back to Futurity and grinned. `And this is my own adventure, isn’t it, acolyte? Something the original Poole never shared. He’d probably be appalled, knowing him. I’m the black sheep! What was that about more real?’

Mara said, `I will be with you at Timelike Infinity, Michael Poole, when this burden will pass.’

That was a standard Wignerian prayer. Poole said gently, `Yes. Perhaps I’ll see you there, Mara. Who knows?’ He nodded to Futurity. `Goodbye, engineer. Remember - open mind.’

`Open mind,’ Futurity said softly.

Poole turned, leapt away from the ship, and vanished in a shimmering of pixels.

After that, Futurity spent long hours studying the evanescent patterns in the air of the black hole. He tried to convince himself he could see more structure: new textures, a deeper richness. Perhaps Michael Poole really was in there, with Sharn. Or perhaps Michael Poole had already gone on to his next destination, or the next after that. It was impossible to tell.

He gave up, turned to his data desk, and began to work out how he was going to explain all this to the Hierocrat.

With the Shipbuilders swarming through their corridors and access tubes, the ship lifted out of the accretion disc of Chandra, and sailed for Base 478, and then for Earth.

In the end the Ideocracy and the Kardish Imperium inevitably fell on each other.

Such wars of succession consumed millennia and countless lives. It was not a noble age, though it threw up plenty of heroes.

But time exerted its power. The wars burned themselves out. Soon the Coalition with all its works and its legacies was forgotten.

As for the Wignerian religion, it developed into the mightiest and deepest of all mankind’s religions, and brought consolation to trillions. But in another moment it too was quite forgotten.

And humans, flung upon a million alien shores, morphed and adapted.

This was the Bifurcation of Mankind. How it would have horrified that dry old stick Hama Druz! There were still wars, of course. But now different human species confronted each other, and a fundamental xenophobia fuelled genocides.

As poor Rusel on the Mayflower II had understood, human destiny works itself out on overlapping timescales. An empire typically lasts a thousand years - the Coalition was a pathology. A religion may linger five or ten thousand years. Even a human subspecies will alter unrecognisably after fifty or a hundred thousand years. So on the longest of timescales human history is a complex dissonance, with notes sounding at a multitude of frequencies from the purposeful to the evolutionary, and only the broadest patterns are discernible in its fractal churning.

You learn this if you live long enough, like Rusel, like me.

The age of Bifurcation ended abruptly.

Sixty-five thousand years after the conquest of the Galaxy, genetic randomness threw up a new conqueror. Charismatic, monstrous, carelessly spending human life on a vast scale, the self-styled Unifier used one human type as a weapon against another, before one of his many enemies took his life, and his empire disintegrated, evanescent as all those before.

And yet the Unifier planted the seeds of a deeper unity. Not since the collapse of the Coalition had the successors of mankind recalled that their ancestors had shared the same warm pond. After ten thousand more years that unity found a common cause.

Mankind’s hard-won Galaxy was a mere tidal pool of muddy light, while all around alien cultures commanded a wider ocean. Now those immense spaces became an arena for a new war. As in the time of the Unifier, disparate human types were thrown into the conflict; new subspecies were even bred specifically to serve as weapons.

This war continued in various forms for a hundred thousand years. In the end, like the Unifier, mankind was defeated by the sheer scale of the arena - and by time, which erodes all human purposes.

But mankind didn’t return to complete fragmentation, not quite. For now a new force began to emerge in human politics.

The undying. Us. Me.

Since the time of Michael Poole, there had been undying among the ranks of mankind. Some of us were engineered to be so, and others were the children of the engineered. We emerged and died in our own slow generations, a subset of mankind.

The hostility of mortals was relentless. It pushed us together - even if, often, in mutual loathing. But we were always dependent on the mass of mankind. Undying or not, we were still human; we needed our short-lived cousins. We spent most of our long lives hiding, though.

We undying had rather enjoyed the long noon of the Coalition, for all that authority’s persecution of us. Stability and central control was what we sought above all else. To us the Coalition’s collapse, and the churning ages that followed, were a catastrophe.

When, two hundred thousand years after the time of Hama Druz, the storm of extragalactic war at last blew itself out, we decided enough was enough. We had always worked covertly, tweaking history here and there - as I had meddled in the destiny of the Exultants. Now it was different. In this moment of human fragmentation and weakness, we emerged from the shadows, and began to act.

We established a new centralising government called the Commonwealth. Slowly - so slowly most mayflies lived and died without ever seeing what we were doing - we strove to challenge time, to dam the flow of history. To gain control, at last.

And we attempted a deeper unity, a linking of minds called the Transcendence. This superhuman entity would envelop all of mankind in its joyous unity, reaching even deep into the past to redeem the benighted lives that had gone before. But the gulf between man and god proved too wide to bridge.

Half a million years after mankind first left Earth, the Transcendence proved the high water mark of humanity’s dreams.

When it fell our ultimate enemies closed in.

At first there was a period of stasis - the Long Calm, the historians called it. It lasted two hundred thousand years. The stasis was only comparative; human history resumed, with all its usual multiple-wavelength turbulence.

Then the stars began to go out.

It was the return of the Xeelee: mankind’s ultimate foe, superior, unforgiving, driven out of the home Galaxy but never defeated.

It had been thought the Xeelee were distracted by a war against a greater foe, creatures of dark matter called `photino birds` who were meddling with the evolution of the stars for their own purposes -

a conflict exploited by Admiral Kard long ago to trigger the human-Xeelee war. The Xeelee were not distracted.

It had been thought the Xeelee had forgotten us. They had not forgotten.

We called the Xeelee’s vengeance the Scourge. It was a simple strategy: the stars that warmed human worlds were cloaked in an impenetrable shell of the Xeelee’s fabled `construction material’. It was even economical, for these cloaks were built out of the energy of the stars themselves. It was a technology that had actually been stumbled on long before by human migrants of the Second Expansion, then rediscovered by the Coalition’s Missionaries - discovered, even colonised, but never understood.

One by one, the worlds of man fell dark. Cruellest of all, when humanity had been driven out, the Xeelee unveiled the cleansed stars.

People had forgotten how to fight. They fled to the home Galaxy, and then fell back further to the spiral arms. But even there the scattered stars faded one by one.

It took the Xeelee three hundred thousand years, but at last, a million years after the first starships, the streams of refugees became visible in the skies of Earth.

But the photino birds had been busy too, progressing their own cosmic project, the ageing of the stars.

When Sol itself began to die, its core bloated with a dark-matter canker, suddenly mankind had nowhere to go.

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