'Do I cross your palm with silver now?

'Sarcasm is a very pitiful social defence mechanism, especially in these circumstances. Both of us know how disturbed you were.

You cannot shield yourself and your emotions from someone as experienced as myself. The gaiafield will show you for what you are.

Aaron made very sure the gaiamotes were completely closed up, allowing nothing to escape from inside his skull. 'Okay then, he grumbled. 'What was I dreaming? 'Something in your past.

'Hey wow. Surely I am in the presence of a truly galactic master of the art.

Unperturbed Corrie-Lyn took another drink of tea. 'More relevantly: a darkness from your past. In order to have survived erasure and to manifest so strongly, I would evaluate it as a crux in your psychological development. Those people were very frightened; terrified even. For so many to be running so fearfully the threat must have been lethal. That is rare in the Commonwealth today, even among the outermost External Worlds.

'So I was running an evacuation mission out of some disaster. Rare but not unfeasible. There's a lot goes on among the External Worlds that the more developed planets turn a blind eye to.

Corrie-Lyn gave him a sad smile. 'You were above them, Aaron. Remember? Not running with them. You were what they feared. You and what you represented. 'That's bullshit.

'Men. Women. Children. All fleeing you. All hysterical and horror-struck. What were you going to do to them, I wonder. We established back at the fane that you have no conscience.

'Very clever, he sneered. 'I pissed you off, and now you come gunning for a little psychological payback. Lady I have to tell you, it takes a great deal more than anything you've got to spook me out, and that's Ozzie's honest truth.

'I'm not trying to spook you anywhere, Aaron, she said with quiet earnest. 'That's not what Living Dream, the true Living Dream, is about. We exist to guide human life to its fulfilment. The promise of the Void is a huge part of that, yes; but it is not the only component to understanding what you are, your basic nature. I want to liberate the potential inside you. There is more than senseless violence lurking inside your mind, I can sense that. You can be so much more than what you are today, if you'd just let me help. We can explore your dreams together.

'Call me old fashioned, but my dreams are my own.

'The darkness you witnessed at the end interests me.

'That shadow? Despite himself, Aaron was curious she'd picked up on it.

'A winged shadow — which has a strong resonance for most humans no matter which cultural stream they come from. But it was more than a simple shadow. It held significant meaning to you. A representation of your subconscious, I think. After all, it didn't surprise you. If anything you felt almost comfortable with it.

'Whatever. We have more important things to concentrate on right now. Touchdown is in five and a half hours. Something in his mind was telling him to close this conversation down now. She was trying to distract him, to throw him off guard. He couldn't allow that, he had to remain completely focused on his mission to locate Inigo.

Corrie-Lyn raised an eyebrow. 'Are you seriously saying you're not interested? This is the real you we're talking about.

'I keep telling you, I'm happy with what I am. Now, you said Inigo came to Anagaska to visit his family.

She gave him a disheartened gaze. 'I said he visited his homeworld on occasion, when everything got too much for him. All I know was that he had family. Any further inference is all your own.

'His mother migrated inwards then downloaded into ANA. What about the aunt?

'I don't know.

'Did the aunt have children? Cousins he would have grown up with?

'I don't know.

'Was there a family estate? A refuge he felt secure in?

'I don't know.

He sat back, and just about resisted glaring at her. 'His official biography says he grew up in Kuhmo. Please tell me that isn't a lie?

'I'd assume it was correct. That is, I have no reason to doubt it. It's where Living Dream built his library.

'Central worship point for your living god, huh?

'I'm not surprised you don't want to know yourself. You're a real shit, you know that.

The good ship Artful Dodger slipped back into real space a thousand kilometres above Anagaska. Aaron told the smartcore to register with the local spacewatch network and request landing permission at Kuhum spaceport. The request was granted immediately, and the starship began its descent into the middle of the cloud-smeared eastern continent.

When it was first confirmed as H-congruous and assigned for settlement by CST back in 2375, Anagaska was an unremarkable world in what was then called phase three space, destined for a long slow development. Then the Starflyer plunged the Commonwealth into war against the Prime aliens and its future changed radically.

Hanko was one of the forty-seven planets wrecked during the Prime's last great assault against the Commonwealth, its sun pummelled by flare bombs and quantumbusters, saturating the defenceless planet's climate and biosphere with a torrent of lethal radiation for weeks on end. Its hundred and fifty million strong population was trapped under city force fields on a dying world whose very air was now deadly poison. Evacuation was the only possible option. And thanks to Nigel Sheldon and the CST company operating Hanko's wormhole link, its citizens were shunted across forty-two lightyears to Anagaska.

Unfortunately, Anagaska at the time was nothing more than wild forest, native prairie, and hostile jungle; with a grand total of five pre-settlement research stations housing a few hundred scientists. Nigel even had a solution to that. The interior of the wormhole transporting Hanko's population to their new home was given a different, very slow, temporal flow rate relative to the outside universe. With the War over, trillions of dollars were poured into creating an infrastructure on Anagaska and the other forty-six refuge worlds. It took over a century to complete the basic civic amenities and housing, producing cities and towns that were near-Stalinist in their layout and architecture. But when the wormhole from Hanko finally opened on Anagaska, everyone who came through was provided with a roof over their head and enough food to sustain them while they built up their new home's agriculture and industry.

It was perhaps inevitable that after such a trauma, the refuge worlds were slow to develop economically. Their major cities progressed sluggishly in an era when the rest of the Commonwealth was undergoing profound change. As to the outlying towns, they became near-stagnant backwaters. Nobody starved, nobody was particularly poor, but they lacked the dynamism that was sweeping the rest of humanity as biononics became available, ANA came online, and new political and cultural blocs were formed.

Kuhmo was such a town. Little had changed in the seven centuries between the day its new residents arrived, stumbling out of giant government transporters, and the time Inigo was born. When he was a child, the massive hexagonal arcology built to house his ancestors still dominated the centre of the civic zone, its uninhabited upper levels decaying alarmingly while its lower floors offered cheap accommodation to underprivileged families and third-rate businesses. In fact it was still there sixty years later when he left, a monstrous civic embarrassment to a town that didn't have the money to either refurbish or demolish it.

A hundred years later, the arcology's upper third had finally been dismantled with funds from Anagaska's federal government made available on public safety grounds. Then Living Dream made the town council a financial offer they couldn't really refuse. The arcology was finally razed, its denizens rehoused in plush new purpose-built suburbs. Where it had stood, a new building emerged, nothing like as big, but far more important. Living Dream was constructing what was to be Anagaska's primary fane, with a substantial library and free college attached. It attracted the devout from across the planet and a good many nearby star systems, many of them staying, changing the nature of Kuhmo for ever.