She called up a projection of its trajectory. “Well, it’s not heading for the Britain,” she told Virtual-Mark. “It’s moving past us…”

A new voice came crackling out of her data desk now. “Arrow Maker. Arrow Maker. Listen to me. You must reach the Interface. Don’t let them stop you…”

To Louise, this was a voice from the dead past. It was distorted by age, almost reduced to a caricature, echoing as if centuries were empty rooms.

She localized the source of the transmission — a desk in the base of the lifedome, near the pod hangars — and she threw open a two-way link. “Uvarov? Garry Uvarov?”

The voice fell silent, abruptly.

She heard Mark, in the pod, saying, “Now just take it easy. I know this is strange for you, but I’m not going to hurt you.” A pause. “I couldn’t if I tried. I’ll tell you a secret: I’m not real. See? My hand is passing right through your arm, and — ”

More screams, even shriller than before.

Oh, Mark…

“Come on, Uvarov,” she said. “I know it’s you. I still recognize that damn Moon accent. Speak to me.”

“Oh, Lethe, Louise,” Mark reported, “he’s gone crazy. He’s grabbed the stick: he’s accelerating — right toward the Interface.”

Mark was right, she saw; the craft’s speed had increased, and it was clearly heading to where the wormhole Interface was cradled in its web of superconducting hoops, bound magnetically to the structure of the GUTship.

She punched in quick queries. Less than two minutes remained before the pod reached the Interface.

“Uvarov, listen to me,” she said urgently. “You must respond. Please.” While she spoke her hands flew over the desks; she ordered her processors to find some way to take control of the pod. She cursed herself, silently, for her carelessness. She’d had centuries, literally, to find ways of immobilizing the lifedome pods. But she’d never imagined this scenario, some crazy savage with a painted face taking a pod into the Interface while they were still relativistic.

Well, she damn well should have imagined it.

“Uvarov. You must respond. We’re still in flight.” She tried to imagine the old eugenicist’s condition, extrapolating wildly from the few words she’d heard him speak. “Uvarov, can you hear me? You have to stop him — the man in the pod, this Arrow Maker. He’ll destroy himself…” And, she thought sourly, maybe the whole damn ship as well. “You know as well as I do that the Interface can’t be used during the flight. The kinetic energy difference between our Interface and the one back in the past will make the wormhole unstable. If your Arrow Maker flies that pod in there, he’ll wreck the wormhole.”

“You’re lying,” Uvarov rasped. “The journey’s over. We’ve seen the stars.”

“Uvarov, listen to me. We’re still relativistic.” She turned to peer out of the galley’s small windows. The Britain was suspended beneath the belly of the lifedome, so that the dome was huge and brilliant above her; the spine pierced space a few hundred yards away. And, all around the spine, the starbow — the ring of starlight aberrated by their motion — gleamed dully, infinitely far away.

With a small corner of her mind, she longed to shut this out, to erect some Virtual illusion to hide in.

“I can see the damn starbow, Uvarov. With my own eyes, right now. We’re decelerating, but we’re still relativistic. We have decades of this journey ahead of us yet…” Was it possible Uvarov had forgotten?

In the background she could hear Mark’s voice patiently pleading with the primitive in the pod; her desks showed her endless representations of the processors’ failed attempts to override the pod’s autonomous systems, and the astonishingly rapid convergence of the pod with the Interface.

He pushed the crude control as far forward as it would go. The pod hurtled past the spine. He felt mesmerized, bound up in the extraordinary events around him, beyond any remnants of fear.

Once again a frame of light embraced the pod, expanding, enclosing, like a swallowing mouth. This time, the frame was triangular, not rectangular; it was rimmed by blue light, not silver-white. And it contained — not a bleak, charcoal-gray emptiness — but a pool of golden light, elusive, shimmering.

There were stars in that pool. How ironic it was, thought Arrow Maker, that perhaps here at last he would find the stars of which old, mad Uvarov had dreamed.

The ghost-man — Mark — was still speaking to him, urgently; but the ghost was crumbling into cubes of light, which scattered in the air, shrinking and melting.

Arrow Maker barely noticed.

Suddenly, she thought she understood.

She spoke rapidly. “Uvarov, listen. Please. The skydome above the forest isn’t truly transparent. It’s semisentient — it’s designed to deconvolve the distorting effects of the flight, to project an illusion of stars, of normal sky. Garry, can you hear me? The skydome shows a reconstruction of the sky and I think you’ve forgotten that it’s a reconstruction. The forest people can’t have seen the stars.” She tried to find words to reach this man, whom she’d first known a thousand years ago. “I’m sorry, Garry. I truly am. But you must make him turn back.”

“Louise.” Mark’s voice was clipped, urgent. “Arrow Maker is not responding. I’m starting to break up; we’re already within the exoticity field of the Interface, and — ”

Uvarov screamed, “The Interface, Arrow Maker! You’ll travel back across five million years — tell them we’re here, that we made it, Arrow Maker!”

Now there were other voices on Uvarov’s link: a man, a girl. “Maker! Maker! Come back…”

Mark’s voice faded out.

On Louise’s desk, the gleaming, toylike images, of pod and Interface, converged.

The blue-white framework was all around him now, its glow flooding the cabin of the pod with shadowless light and banishing the spine and lifedome, as if they were insubstantial. The pod shuddered, its framework glowing blue-violet.

The voice of Spinner-of-Rope, his daughter, became indistinct.

He called to her: “Look after your sister, Spinner-of-Rope.”

He couldn’t make out her reply. Soon there was only the tone of her dear voice, pleading, pressing.

A tunnel — lined by sheets of light, shimmering, impossibly long — opened out before him.

He sank into the golden pool, and even Spinner’s voice was lost.

Louise massaged her temples and closed her eyes. There was nothing more she could do. Not now.

She remembered how it had become clear — early in the flight, after a shockingly short time — that the Northern’s fragile artificial society was going to collapse. Mark had helped her understand the cramped social dynamics going on inside the lifedome: the dome contained a closed system, he said, with positive socio-feedback mechanisms leading to wild instabilities, and…

But understanding hadn’t helped them cope with the collapse.

The first rebellion had been inspired by one of Louise’s closest allies: Uvarov, who had led his eugenics-inspired withdrawal to the forest. After that Superet or rather, the Planners who had turned the original Superet philosophy into a bizarre ideology — had subverted whatever authority Louise had retained and imposed its will on the remaining inhabitants of the lifedome.

Louise and Mark had withdrawn to this place: to the converted, secure Great Britain. From here Louise had isolated the starship’s essential systems — life support and control — from the inhabitants of the dome. During the long centuries since — long after Mark’s death, long after the occupants of the dome had forgotten her existence — she had watched over the swarming masses within the lifedome: regulating their air, ensuring the balance of the small, enclosed ecologies was maintained, guiding the ship to its final destination.