Reath said, “Retrospectively historians call the Unifier’s brief empire the Second Integrality of Mankind — the First being the Coalition. The Unifier planted the seeds of a post-Bifurcation unity. But it took a long time before those seeds took root.”

It was ten thousand years, in fact, before mankind began to act once more with a semblance of unity. And once again that unity required a common cause.

Mankind still controlled the Galaxy. But that Galaxy was a mere puddle of muddy light, while all around alien cultures commanded a wider ocean. Now those immense spaces became an arena for a new war. As in the time of the Unifier, disparate human types were thrown into the conflict; new subspecies were even bred specifically to serve as weapons. This war continued in various forms for a hundred thousand years.

“An unimaginable length of time,” Reath said, shaking his head. “Why, those who concluded the war weren’t even the same species as those who started it! And yet they fought on.”

The war didn’t so much end as fizzle out. Like the Unifier, mankind was defeated by the sheer scale of the arena and, exhausted, fell back to its home Galaxy — though relics were left stranded to fend for themselves, far from home. The long unity of the Third Integrality was lost.

“But we didn’t return to complete fragmentation, not quite,” Reath said. “For now a new force began to emerge in human politics: the undying.”

Almost since the time of Michael Poole, there had been undying among the ranks of mankind. Some of these were engineered to be so, by humans or even by nonhumans, and others were the children of the engineered. Of course none of these were truly “immortal”; it was just that they couldn’t foresee a time when they would die. They emerged and died in their own slow generations, a subset of mankind who counted their lives in tens of millennia or more.

The hostility of mortal mankind to these undying was relentless. It pushed the undying together, uniting them for common protection — even if, often, in mutual loathing. But they were always dependent on the mass of mankind. Undying or not, they were still human; if the rest of humanity were to be destroyed, it was doubtful indeed if the undying could survive long. So while their view of the world was very different from that of the mortals, the undying ones needed their short-lived cousins.

The undying had rather enjoyed the long noon of the Coalition. Stability and central control was what they sought above all else. To them the Coalition’s collapse, and the churning ages of Bifurcation that followed, were a catastrophe.

When, two hundred thousand years after the time of Michael Poole, the storm of extragalactic war at last blew itself out, the undying decided enough was enough. In this moment of human fragmentation and weakness, they began to act. They set about knitting the scattered scraps of mankind into a new Integrality — the Fourth — which they would call the Commonwealth.

The new Commonwealth crept across the bruised stars. It was a slow process. By Alia’s time, since the founding of the Commonwealth three hundred thousand years had worn away; it was a remarkable thought that the great project of the Fourth Integrality had already taken most of human history. But the undying were patient.

And meanwhile they began a program to share their own longevity with as many mortals as possible. Even this was dedicated to the interests of the undying themselves — for, whatever their origins among the multiple subspecies of mankind, the new undying would quickly inherit the values and concerns of those who engineered their emergence.

Reath was enthusiastic. “It’s really a wonderful vision, Alia. The undying are no elite. They are making us like themselves, giving us the gift of their own unimaginably long lives…”

But this cold calculation repelled Alia. It was as if the cold kiss of an undying transformed a mortal into one of them, causing her to become infected with their long inhuman perspectives. It was a plague of nondeath, she thought uneasily.

Reath breathed, “And they conceived of another tremendous project. At the heart of the Commonwealth the undying began to build the Transcendence. The undying dream of a new form of human life, a higher form — the betterment of us all achieved through a new unity. A dream, a wonderful dream!…”

Alia turned back to the Witnessing tank, set to a random moment in Poole’s sixth decade, a three-dimensional slice cut out of his four-dimensional life. How strange it was that she should be united in this way with Michael Poole — he at the very beginning of mankind’s great adventure, and she, perhaps, at its end. But she was not unique. In principle, the Transcendence ordered, every human child must participate in the Witnessing of the past.

It was a strange fact that for most of mankind the business of the Witnessing, and the wider program of Redemption Reath had hinted at, was the most visible manifestation of the nascent Transcendence’s ambitions. But, Alia thought now, how strange it was that the Transcendents, while reaching for the future, should be so obsessed with the past.

She tried to express this to Reath.

“Redemption is the will of the Transcendence,” he said peremptorily. “And so to understand the Transcendence you must understand the Redemption.”

“But what difference does it make? Michael Poole never knew I’ve been watching him all my life.”

“It certainly makes a difference to us, doesn’t it? The only alternative to knowing is not to know, to ignore all the suffering of the bloodstained generations that preceded us. Wouldn’t that diminish us?”

“I don’t know,” Alia said honestly.

“We have time to explore this later.” He stood up. “This has been a rich conversation. You’ve given me much to think about, Alia.”

“I have? But you’re the teacher.”

He smiled. “I keep telling you. The wisdom you need is within yourself, not in me. And I think you’re learning how to find that wisdom very well… Do you feel you are ready for the Second Implication?”

She took a deep breath. “Let’s do it.”

“Tomorrow, then, we will make a new landfall.”

After he left, idly she let the tank projection run forward.

There was Poole, clambering over that strange reef of broken machinery. Hot, dirty, he seemed troubled, agitated; he seemed to be trying to reach something, or someone.

And then he turned and looked up, out of the tank, directly into Alia’s eyes.

She gasped. She clapped her hands, and the Witnessing tank cleared. The image of Poole disappeared, that stern accusing stare evaporating in a blur of cubical pixels.

That was not supposed to happen.

I ordered a pod bus to take me back to the airport.

The pod, not much more than a dozen seats in a gleaming glass bubble and a hydrogen-fuel engine hidden in the floor, rolled silently up to my mother’s front door. There was one other passenger, apparently airport-bound like me. I clambered aboard with my suitcase. Embarrassingly my mother kissed me good-bye on the step. The pod sealed itself up and hissed away.

We worked our way out into the road system, the bus’s own local sentience tying into a system-wide intelligence mediated by a sky full of satellites and an invisible lacing of microwave signals. The traffic gradually built up, until we had in view, oh, at least twenty vehicles whirring away along the silvertop: pod buses like mine, cabs, delivery trucks, transport for disabled people, emergency vehicles like ambulances and fire trucks. My bus, as it swam into this stream, attached itself to more of its kind, nose to tail, until we were in a train of eight or ten pods, rolling easily along the road. I could see the heads of my fellow passengers in the bright blisters of the other pods. Every so often other pods would join us, or the train would crack open, releasing a pod to peel off down a slip road to perform some local pickup or dropoff.