'And if that fails?

'Then you will bring your proposal to Council.

Fourteen hundred years was a long time alive by anyone's standards. However, there were Commonwealth citizens who had remained in their bodies for longer; Paula had even met a few of them. She didn't enjoy their company. Mostly they were Dynasty members who couldn't let go of the old times when their family empires used to run the Commonwealth. After biononics and ANA and Higher culture changed the Central Worlds for ever, they'd grabbed what they could of their ancient wealth and reestablished themselves on External Worlds where they set about recreating their personal golden age.

They had the money and influence to be bold and build new experimental societies, something different, something exciting; but for all their extraordinarily long life, they'd never experienced another way to live. And the longer they managed to maintain their own little empire around them the more resistant to change they became. Nothing new was attempted, instead they mined history for stability. On one planet in particular their social engineering reached its nadir. Iaioud, where a ruling Halgarth collective had founded and maintained a society that was even less susceptible to change than Huxley's Haven by the simple expedient of prohibiting conception. At the end of a fifty year life every citizen was rejuvenated and memory wiped — except the state knew who they were and what job they did best. On emerging fresh from their clinic treatment they would then be appointed to the same profession again, and spend the next fifty years working as they had done for the last fifty — hundred, three hundred years. It was the ultimate feudalism.

Three hundred years ago, Paula had led an undercover team of agents there, infiltrating the clinics which performed the rejuvenation treatment and slowly corrupting them. Over the next few years memory wipes became incomplete, allowing people to remember what had gone before. Thousands of women discovered that their revitalized bodies had a functional uterus again. Underground networks were established; first to help the criminal outcasts who had given birth to children, then assuming a greater role in offering political resistance to the Halgarth regime.

Forty years after Paula and her team finished their mission to sow dissent on Iaioud, a revolution overturned the Halgarth collective using minimal force. It took a further hundred and fifty years for the twisted world to regain its equilibrium and claw its way back up the socioeconomic index to something approaching the average for an External World.

At the time, Paula had worried she still wasn't ready for that kind of mission. Change was a long time coming within herself. It was one thing to realize intellectually that she had to adapt mentally to keep up with the ever-shifting cultures of the Greater Commonwealth. But unlike everyone else, she had to make a conscious decision to alter herself physically in order for that evolution to manifest. Her carefully designed DNA hardwired her neurones into specific personality traits. In order to survive any kind of phrenic progression she had to first destroy what was. An action which came perilously close to individuality suicide. And in her, as in every human, vanity wasn't something bound to DNA; she considered her existing personality to be more than adequate — in short, she liked being herself.

But in slow increments, every time she needed to undergo rejuvenation, she modified a little bit more of her psychoneural profiling. At the end of the three-century process, she was still obsessive about a great many things, but now it was through choice rather than a physically ordained compulsion. One time long ago, when she'd tried to mentally overcome her need to apprehend a criminal in order to achieve a greater goal, the effort had put her body into a severe type of shock. By removing the Foundation's physiological constraints her mind could now flourish in ways her long-departed designers never envisaged. She'd been born with the intention of tracking down individual criminals, the kind which might plague the society of Huxley's Haven; but now she had the freedom to take an overview. Yet none of the liberations she selected for herself ever touched the core of her identity, she always retained her intuitive understanding of what was right and wrong. Her soul was untainted.

Iaioud tested her new, versatile self to the extreme. She accepted that the way in which the Halgarth collective had set up the constitution was intrinsically wrong, oppressing an entire population. In fact she would have probably acknowledged that before. But the whole nature of laioud's rigid society was uncomfortably close to that of Huxley's Haven. After a while she decided that the difference was simple enough. On Iaioud, people were being kept in line by a brutally authoritarian regime misusing Commonwealth medical technology. While on Huxley's Haven, strictures and conformity came from within. Possibly there had been a crime, right back at the founding, when the Human Structure Foundation started birthing an entire population with DNA modified to their grand scheme. The old liberal groups might have been right — a thought which would have finally pleased the radicals who had stolen her as a baby. But however great the sin committed at its genesis, the constraints placed on the population of Huxley's Haven were internal. Its people now couldn't be changed without destroying what they were. By far the bigger crime.

So she convinced herself, anyway. These days she wrote it off as an argument between philosophies. Interesting, and completely disconnected from real life. The Commonwealth had enough real problems to keep her fully occupied. Though even she had to admit, the whole Pilgrimage issue was throwing up some unique complications.

For once she couldn't decide if Living Dream had the right to set off on Pilgrimage, and be damned to possible consequences. The dilemma came from the total lack of empirical evidence that the Void would consume the rest of the galaxy. She had to admit that a lot of pro-Pilgrimage Factions and commentators were right to be sceptical. The assumption Living Dream were courting annihilation was all based on information which came from the Raiel. The immense timescale since the last catastrophic macro-expansion phase would distort any information no matter how well stored; throw in aliens with their own agenda and she simply couldn't accept the claim at face value.

ANA: Governance was also keen to acquire more information on the situation, which gave Paula a useful outlet for her energies, and thankfully little time to brood over the politics involved. Her assignment, as always, was to stop the Factions from engineering the physical citizens of the Commonwealth into actions they wouldn't otherwise have performed.

She'd left St Mary's Clinic and returned to her ship, the Alexis Denken, a sleek ultradrive vessel which ANA: Governance had supplied and armed to a degree which would alarm any Navy captain. She left the planet, then hung in transdimensional suspension twenty AUs out from the star. It was a position which allowed her to monitor the ftl traffic within the Anagaska system with astonishing accuracy. Unfortunately, the one thing her ship's sensors couldn't do was locate a cold trail. There was no trace of Aaron's ship. Given the time between the raid on the clinic and her arrival, she suspected he had an ultradrive ship. Marius certainly had one. Her u-shadow monitored him arriving back at the city starport and getting into a private yacht. Alexis Denken's sensors tracked it slipping into hyper-space. For those in the know, the signature was indicative of an ultradrive.

An hour later, the Delivery Man took off in his own ship which had an equally suspicious drive signature. He flew away in almost exactly the opposite direction to Marius. Ten minutes later another starship dropped out of transdimensional suspension where it had been waiting in the system's cometary halo, and began to fly along the same course as the Delivery Man.