In the beginning there was darkness. A cold inevitability that woke the ice, sending shivers through its body, each shiver a billion kilometres of glass reflecting aimlessly in space.

The darkness felt like electricity and tasted like strangeness. There was little in common between it and the mind which had woken into it and the darkness knew this.

Chuang Tzu slept.

And while he slept his icy sleep, something happened elsewhere. Lithium fissioned into helium, tritium and energy... Deuterium fused, as did tritium itself. When enough neutrons had been produced to create further fission Central Beijing vaporized, the resulting over-pressure expanding as shockwave and losing power as it went. Twenty-eight million people died almost instantly.

None of this Chuang Tzu or the darkness knew because it happened fifteen generations removed in a world which had long since lost interest in the SZ Loyal Prince. More ships and better had been built and launched and there were those who'd denied the SZ Loyal Prince was still out there and some who claimed it had exploded mere weeks after the mission began.

A whole cult had grown up around the idea that those chosen had been secretly executed or given over to experiments, that the televised launch had been stage-managed and the mission originally created to divert attention from war in Tibet. The darkness cared for none of this and though it tried to identify the small star venerated by the Chuang Tzu, whom it thought of only as the ice, this proved impossible. A fact the darkness understood to mean the star itself had been destroyed.

Closer acquaintance with the ice showed that in all probability it would not regard the destruction of a star as commonplace at all. It would probably regard this as very worrying.

And this the darkness found interesting, although not as interesting as the way the ice stored data, which was as interference patterns and reactions of chemicals, jumping sparks and webs of connections laid down as overlays on webs that had gone before.

A million permutations produced the fraction of one thought. In the end, irritated by the slowness of data extraction, the darkness took to deconstructing thousands of thoughts at once. And yet it still took decades for the darkness to realize that the data was fragmented and difficult to extract simply because it was not laid down in a coherent form.

So the darkness woke slightly and, having considered this, realized that the fragmentary nature of the data's extraction was a side effect of the coldness from which it had to be extracted. Which meant, it seemed to the darkness, that the very medium which held the data also hindered its use. An idea that made the darkness look beyond the ice to the nature of the material frozen.

The azimuth and angle of its looking was narrow and the fragment of the darkness designated to do the looking was less than one thousandth of the whole. But this was still sufficient for the darkness to realize that the ice was surrounded by separate and less coherent forms of data. Only the data in these forms was so corrupted that extracting it made mining the living ice look easy.

There was a distinction between the types of data, their containers and the ripped container within which they all floated. So the darkness began with the most dense of the data hordes, examining the SZ Loyal Prince and its semiAI, running millions of routines in an attempt to understand its origins.

A type II star, a sequence of nine planets (actually seven, as two did not rate that definition or, if they did, so did others not included in the nine), carbon-based life, relatively new, technologically simple. The darkness trawled opera from Peking, Rodin's Kiss, music by Brahms, the pyramids and Sphinx, the Great Wall of China and a painting of a soup can without understanding what any of them might be (or that they were carried under protest from Beijing, their mix chosen to reflect global levels of culture).

In the beginning there was darkness. A cold curiosity that waited for meaning, tasting numbers and extracting data from the chaos of eighteen hundred dead refugees, one rotting Colonel Commissar, a doctor frozen at the point of dying and a mind being slowly reclaimed from hibernation.

The darkness felt like electricity and tasted like strangeness. There was little enough in common between it and the hibernating mind and the darkness knew this.

So it reversed the process by which that mind became frozen.

Chuang Tzu woke.

Still strapped into position, his bladder cathetered, tubes entering his mouth and rectum and a claw from the side of the pod busy suturing a wound in his neck. The scream of the young Chinese navigator barely made it past the tube pumping whatever slop was being pumped into his stomach, passed through his colon and sucked from his body.

The whole level was in darkness. A vast impenetrable blackness that hugged the glass lid of his pod and swallowed floor, ceiling and all four walls. The emergency lights were off. More terrifying still, no lights showed on the panel controlling the pod, not even standby.

"Madame?" Major Commissar Chuang Tzu choked on the word and felt it return like an echo.

"Madame?"

"Who's there?"

"Who's there?"

"Help me," said Chuang, adding, "Please."

"Okay," said the darkness.

Chuang Tzu slept and dreamt of home. That he considered Grandfather Luo's farm home surprised him. He would have thought home was that flat in the Bund, the one he'd briefly shared with Wu. This was on the fifth floor of an ancient apartment block overlooking the harbour in Shanghai. And had the lift worked Wu's purchase of the apartment would have been impossible.

Although, to be honest, under the new rules no one owned anything outright in the Middle Kingdom. The flat was leased from Beijing for nine hundred and ninety-nine years, the payment for the lease charged over a period of twenty-five years. It was a common arrangement and open to easy abuse. Only one person was supposed to live in the apartment but two often did and sometimes three.

When Wu's sister came to stay and remained to live, muttering was heard from the concierge but that was mere habit. Had the concierge known about Chuang Tzu's friendship with Wu there would have been more than muttering. So Wu's idea that his friend should pretend to be close to his sister was a good one. It was just a pity that Wu found his sister and best friend together in bed.

He went back to Grandfather Luo's after that, saying nothing. Just turning up from the city with a case full of suits and the latest notebook semiAI, its case cut from a single block of hardened glass. The suits had been useless, too thin to wear in winter and too fragile to survive work on the farm. Ripping them up for rags had given Chuang Tzu's grandmother endless pleasure.

Wu's sister called him, and when her calls went unanswered she wrote a serious letter on rag paper full of regrets and fine sentiments. It was handwritten, in the classic cao shu style. Chuang Tzu never saw Madame Mimi, his grandmother, read the letter but everything changed after it arrived.

She no longer mocked his poetry or hammered on his bedroom door at dawn because the hens needed feeding. She fed him first from the pot and darned and mended his clothes herself. Girls from the village started to turn up unexpectedly and when her grandson showed no interest in farmers' daughters, the daughters and granddaughters of other exiles were invited to tea, or for supper or to stay the week.

In the end, because Chuang Tzu was growing up and had learnt how to handle his grandmother, he made friends with Lin Yao, a quiet girl from Xingjian. Her name meant jade treasure and she was tall and thin, with straight hair and tiny breasts topped with the longest nipples he'd ever seen. Although it took him eight months to discover these and he wondered later if they were the reason she'd been so unwilling to let him slide his hand inside her shirt.