“I think you’re beginning to understand,” he said. “To be given Indefinite Longevity, to be released from a finite life span, is a step change, like ice turning to water, a total transformation. And you would have to find a way to act, to contribute to the human world, to make a difference, even though this great weight of time was hanging over you.”

“Why must I act?”

“Because longevity is necessary for the greatest projects of all. A human life is just too short to accrue true wisdom. By the time you’ve figured out how things work, you’re aging, losing your faculties, dying.”

“But Michael Poole lived less than a century.”

“True. It’s amazing those poor archaics achieved as much as they did!”

“Reath, if I were to become a Transcendent, what about my family?”

“They couldn’t follow you,” he said gently.

She would be alone, she thought, left stranded by time. One by one her family and friends would turn to dust — even Drea, even her new kid brother. Could she live with that? Only by shutting herself off, by closing down her heart. How could she possibly choose such a path?

“Reath, you said I might discover wisdom within me. I’m not wise at all. I haven’t lived long enough. Ask my mother how wise I am!”

“Your age isn’t the point. If you know you are undying, it’s not your past that gives you wisdom. It is your future — or your awareness of it. And I think you are already starting to acquire some of that awareness. You don’t have to choose now,” he said gently. “We’re only at the beginning, you and I, of our exploration.”

“Reath—” She hesitated. “Are you a Transcendent?”

“Me?” He laughed, brusquely, but he turned away.

An alarm chimed. “Oh!” Reath said. “They’re arriving at last.”

They hurried from the flitter.

At first she could see nothing but the clamor of the waves as they swelled and subsided. But then she saw a sleek shape, pale white, passing just under the surface of the water. Another followed, coming up from the darker depths, and a third, skimming like the first around the platform.

Soon there were a dozen of the creatures, perhaps more. Some of them were smaller — children, perhaps, calves with their parents. They were streamlined and coated with a thick fur; they moved with grace and startling speed. And they swarmed past and over each other, moving with an awareness of each other that seemed uncanny.

Reath peered down, smiling. He was clearly enjoying the sight.

But Alia was ship-born; living things didn’t interest her much. “Very pretty,” she said. “So what? Where are the people?”

He looked at her, raising his eyebrows. “You must learn to see, Alia.”

One of the creatures broke away from the pack and came swimming toward the surface. Now she could see that it had four stubby limbs — four limbs as she had, though these were fins. At the end of each fin was a kind of paddle, webbed with five stubby extensions, perhaps the relics of fingers and toes.

She got the point. That there were four limbs, not two or six or eight, was a clue. A tetrapodal body plan was a hallmark of Earth life, an accidental arrangement that had been settled on early in the development of animals there — including the ancestors of humans — and had been stuck to ever since, even as most of those animals either went extinct or scattered across the Galaxy. But it didn’t have to be that way; six or eight or twelve limbs would have been just as effective. A four-limbed body was a signature: I am from Earth.

The creature broke the surface and lifted its head out of the water. It had a face, with a stubby, smoothed-over nose, and a mouth that gulped at the air. And though its brain pan was flat it had a smooth forehead, a distinct brow — and two eyes, sharp blue, that met her gaze. She felt a powerful shock of recognition, something deep and ancient that joined her to this animal. But those eyes were blank, empty.

The creature broke the brief contact, and dived back beneath the waves and out of sight.

“Remarkable,” Reath murmured. “But now you see why I was evasive about this world’s name…”

“They are human,” she said.

“Well, their ancestors were — and so are these, in the terms the Commonwealth recognizes.

“Their ancestors came here, long ago, at the time of the Bifurcation. They tried to settle. They built rafts, ganged together. They trained their children to fish for the native life-forms — they must have engineered their digestive systems to enable them to eat the fish and crab and eel analogues to be found here.” He shook his head. “But the children and grandchildren took to the water, more and more. The rafts couldn’t be maintained, not in the very long run, for there was no raw material to fix them, and no will to do so either. Soon the ocean closed over the rafts’ last remnants. But the people remained, and their children.”

“And they lost their minds.”

“Well, why not? Alia, big brains are expensive to maintain. If you have an unchanging environment, like this endless ocean, you don’t need to do much thinking. Far better to spend your energy on swimming faster, or diving deeper. A big head would be good for nothing but creating drag! And the adaptation worked.” He stared out. “This ocean could drown ten Earths. There’s no limit to how many of these critters there might be out there. There is room for billions, trillions! Perhaps some of them have adapted further — to go without air, to reach greater depths, even to reach the ice of the sea bed.”

“I never heard of anything like this.”

“You will learn this is a common pattern. Over time humans have been projected into all sorts of environments, and they have adapted. And anywhere the living is stable you find the same phenomenon, an enthusiastic discarding of the burden of thinking.”

She frowned. “The Nord is half a million years old. We were isolated. We could have lost our minds.”

“But you remained a people in transition — never settling, taking your little world with you, rebuilding it all the time. Why, the stroke of genius was to have even your breeding cycle dependent on technology!”

“The birthing pods.”

“Yes. Of course it is possible to retain a technological capability without consciousness — think of the Shipbuilders — but you couldn’t afford to become dumb, for your lives depend on the mechanisms that keep the Nord habitable. For your kind, the trick worked.”

Your kind. I t was a chilling phrase — and an insulting one.

Alia’s people were proud of their pedigree, proud of what they had become. It was a very long time since her remote ancestors had left the home planet, and her physiology, her frame and musculature, were built for low-gravity climbing as much as walking. But after half a million years of selection and purposeful enhancement, in Michael Poole’s terms she was an intuitive genius. But to Reath, it seemed, she was just one of another kind, her people on the Nord and all their rich history just another type of post-human, no better than the mindless creatures swimming in this monstrous sea.

Alia felt resentful, and wanted to have nothing in common with these creatures. “All they do is swim around chasing fish. They are subhuman — aren’t they? If their brains have shriveled, if they have no mind—”

“I always prefer the term ‘post-human,’ regardless of encephalization. Best to avoid value judgments.”

“I can give this world a name,” she said. “Theycan’t.”

“But what need have they of names? Alia, names or not, they were once human. They may have no advanced consciousness now, but they have feelings, sensations, a sensorium probably unlike any other type. They are a thread in mankind’s history, Alia, that must be drawn back into the tapestry. This is why I brought you here. You must learn to see mankind as the Transcendence sees it, without prejudice—”