But it hadn’t turned out that way. For a start, the Moon itself was not like the rocky worlds she had encountered in the Core, where, thanks to the stars’ relentless crowding, few stellar systems were stable, and worlds wandered where they would. The Moon had spent five billion years stuck at the bottom of a star’s gravity well as the companion of a massive planet, and debris, sucked in by those overlapping gravity fields, had battered its surface until nothing was left. As a result, every mountain was sandblasted to a dunelike smoothness, and every scrap of the ground was covered by a thick layer of dust that crushed under your feet where you walked, or kicked up behind you, and stuck to your skinsuit until it was almost impossible to get off, no matter how hard you scrubbed.

And then there were the people.

Incredibly, she was the only person here born beyond the orbit of the Moon. Not only that, aside from a couple of essential-systems and security types, she was the only Navy personnel here. The rest of them, Ministry folk, were bureaucrats — and they were double-domes. From the beginning, they had looked on her as a bizarre, exotic creature from some alien realm, as if she weren’t human at all.

The double-domes had soon discovered that she knew little about their technical specialisms. When she tried to put her foot down, they would bluster and baffle her with jargon. And they squabbled among themselves, the whole time. From the start, the development team was organized into groups corresponding to subcomponents of the CTC processor itself, or else stages of the project: scoping, design, component prototyping, subassembly, integration. No matter how Torec tried, those groups soon became clannish, to the point where many of them wouldn’t even communicate with each other — even though their work would have to fit together seamlessly if the overall goal was to be reached.

It was a horrible frustrating mess. Soon Torec had come to hate the prototype, which developed into a baffling, mazelike complex of components that spread across the gray lunar dust. And she came to hate the techs in their expensive Ministry skinsuits, as they clambered over their equipment, prodding, tinkering, and arguing.

What was worse was that Torec really didn’t care about any of this. This wasn’t her life, her goal; she didn’t want to be here. And when the techs picked up on that they began to ignore her altogether.

She was here for Pirius, not for herself. That was the basic truth. As it happened, she had had feelings for Pirius, even before Nilis had shown up. She knew their relationship was special — though she wasn’t sure he understood it. But now things were different. She knew the situation wasn’t Pirius’s fault, but it was because of him.

She hated the Moon, her work, the people she had to deal with. She was very confused about her feelings for Pirius. And what was worst of all was that he wasn’t here.

When she came out of the shower, the Nilis Virtual was in the room.

His face was bathed in the light of an invisible sun, but he wasn’t looking her way. He had been uncomfortable in her company since that row on the corvette. He said, “Another disappointment, then.”

“Yes.”

The Moon-Earth time lag was small, but enough to be disconcerting until you got used to it. “If only we could use wormholes!”

“Commissary?”

“I know you’ve taken to hiking over to the ruins of the old Qax exotic-matter facility. But do you know why the Qax set up that factory? Because you can use exotic matter to make wormholes, superluminal bridges between two points in space and time. If you configure it correctly, a wormhole can be a tunnel to the past. In fact it was a human wormhole time-bridge that started our trouble with the Qax in the first place.”

Torec had heard some of the techs talking of those semilegendary, pre-Occupation times, and of “Michael Poole,” the great engineer who had built wormholes to open up Sol system, and past and future, too.

“Yes. Now, imagine if we could use wormholes to close our processor’s timelike curves, instead of these absurd toy spaceships we have flying everywhere! You know, it’s a Druzite myth that our progress is forever upward; the merest glance at your ruins shows that. If only Michael Poole were alive now! I’m sure he would have our prototype up and running in a day. Ensign, do you ever think that the people of the past were giants — that we are stunted, small by comparison?”

“No, sir,” she said defiantly. “We are the ones who are here, now. All we can do is our best.”

“Are you talking about duty again, Ensign?”

“Yes, sir.”

“ ’Our best.’ “ He turned to face her. She wondered how she looked to him: just another Virtual ghost, she supposed, palely lit, hovering in the air in his Conurbation apartment. “How do you feel about your work, Torec?”

She knew Nilis would not be satisfied with a bland evasion. “I can’t say I’m happy, sir.”

“You aren’t?”

“This isn’t what I’m trained for. I can see why you took Pirius to Earth; what he did — Pirius Blue — was astonishing. But I was only brought along to keep Pirius happy.”

Nilis sighed. “You feel trapped. Perhaps, you think, without my intervention, you would have ended your relationship with Pirius, moved onto somebody else… You were in the wrong place and the wrong time, and so have ended up here.”

“Something like that,” she said. She kept her face blank. What did this old fool know? Anyhow, it was none of his business.

But as it turned out he did know rather a lot. “In fact,” Nilis said dryly, “you wouldn’t have broken up with Pirius.”

Her face was hot. “How can you know that?”

“Because I asked Pirius Blue. In that other, vanished timeline, Pirius Blue stayed with, ah, Torec Blue, shall we call her, until he left for his last fateful mission. For two years, Ensign. That was a factor in Captain Seath recommending you to come on this mission. She knew, too.”

Torec’s feelings were very complex. She didn’t like discussing her emotional life with this soggy old Commissary, and it made her uncomfortable to talk about a relationship she might have had, but now never would. “You’re talking about two years I won’t live through. Two years of choices I don’t get to make.”

“True,” said Nilis. “So how do you feel now?”

She thought it over. “Just as trapped. More, maybe.”

He laughed. “The curse of predestination! Well, if it’s any consolation, it wasn’t my idea to bring you to Earth.”

“Yes, sir.”

“But now you’re here you have a job to do. You are at least satisfied that you’re doing your best, are you?”

“Yes, sir—”

“Don’t lie to me.” Suddenly his face was blazing.

She flinched. But it struck her that he must have timed that riposte to beat the timelag — he knew what she would say, before he had heard her reply. “Sir?”

“We failed again today, Ensign, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“But it isn’t my fault — the techs—”

“And if we fail in three weeks, when Gramm conducts his final review, then the plug will be pulled. No more funding. Everything will be lost. I suggest you start to do the job I entrusted to you.”

“Sir—”

“And don’t tell me it’s beyond you. Let me give you three pieces of advice. First, the bot control issue. That has plagued us since the beginning.”

“The techs say it might be intractable. The problem of controlling a crowd of FTL bots—”

Nilis waved a hand dismissively; Torec saw Earth soil under his fingernails. “Then step around the problem. Think sideways, Ensign. Let the bots guide themselves. As long as each bot is aware of the position of the other nearest, and follows the overall imperative, the solution will emerge. Tell your techs to let the bots swarm. Next, discipline. Even I, from half a million kilometers away, can see the open warfare that’s broken out between some of your subteams.”