“Forgetfulness.”

“Exactly. So as one species after another turns to dust, Earth is losing its biotic memory: look at it that way. But we, in turn, may as well forget it all, too. I never saw a tiger, and never will, but I never saw T.

Rex either. What difference does it make that one died out thirty years ago and the other sixty-five million? Dead is dead.”

“That’s a brutal viewpoint.”

“Brutal? Realist, my friend. And a realist deals with the world as it is, and not as he wishes it to be. You just have to accept it. In the long-term, from the viewpoint of history, all of this will be seen as an adjustment. It’s just our bad luck to be living through it.” He grinned, wolfish. “Or our good luck. In the meantime, why not enjoy life? Fuck it. I mean, if it’s raining, grab a bucket.”

“So what kind of bucket do you carry?”

“Me? I deal in shit,” he said, evidently enjoying the look on my face.

If a Martian came down to Earth, he said, he might conclude that the main product of mankind was shit. Great rivers of the stuff pour out of our bodies and into the sewers of our towns and cities. In less civilized communities, we just dump it into the sea. In more enlightened places, Jack said, we stir it around and perfume it in sewage plants, and then dump it into the sea.

I could guess where this was going. “Where there’s muck there’s brass.” It was an expression of my mother’s.

Jack grinned. “I like that.” He actually wrote it down on his softscreen. “Muck and brass. But that’s what it boils down to — literally.” Jack worked for a company that sold fancy reactors that treated excrement by driving off the water that formed its bulk, and then extracting various useful hydrocarbons from the residue. “It’s an amazing technology,” he said. “I’ve a brochure you can download if you like.”

“Thanks.”

“It’s all a spin-off from space technology, those closed-loop life-support systems they use up there on the Space Station. Now here we are on Spaceship Earth using the same stuff. Inspiring, isn’t it? Fresh water is short everywhere, and just reclaiming that is often enough to justify the cost of a kit.” He winked again. “Of course we don’t advertise the fact that we’re selling your own shit back to you, but there you go.” He talked about how he sold plants small enough for an individual household, or big enough to handle a whole city block, and then he got on to payment schemes.

I wasn’t very interested, and my attention drifted off.

He glanced at me speculatively. “Here.” He gave me a card. It was black and embossed with silver: THE LETHE RIVER SWIMMING TEAM. “My contact details,” he said. “If you’re interested. It will download into your implant.”

“I don’t understand the name.”

“The Swimming Team is a group of like-minded thinkers,” he said.

“All realists?”

“Absolutely. Listen, I hand out dozens of cards like this. Hundreds. It’s the way we work. No obligation, just like minds on the other end of a comms link. If you ever feel like talking over this stuff, give me a call. Why not?” He eyed me speculatively. “Of course some take the logic a little further.”

Intrigued despite myself, I asked, “They do? Who?”

“I met a guy once, through the Swimming Team. Maybe I shouldn’t tell you his name.” He winked again. “He called himself a Last Hunter. You ever heard of them?…”

The premise turned out to be simple. A Last Hunter aimed to take out the last representative of a species: the last eagle, the last lion, the last elephant of all.

“Think of it,” Jack breathed. His voice was almost seductive. “To be the man to take down the last gorilla, a species that split from humans megayears ago. To end a ten-million-year story, by writing your name across the end of it in blood. Isn’t it a fantastic thought?”

“Are you serious? I’ve never heard anything so immoral—”

He wagged his fingers at me. “Now, let’s not start up on morality again, Mike. Illegal, I grant you. Especially if you have to sneak into a zoo to do it. You see my point, though. Even in a declining world there are ways to make money — a lot of it, if you are smart enough. And, more important, to find meaning — to define yourself.”

I had the feeling he was offering me something. But what? A finger or an ear chopped from the carcass of the last silverback gorilla? I found him overwhelming, disgusting — fascinating.

To my relief a hovering bot approached bearing food and drink, and I had an excuse to switch off. Jack Joy pulled off handfuls of sandwiches and began to feed.

To introduce her to the next Implication, of Unmediated Communication, Reath brought Alia to a new world.

As Reath’s ship slid into orbit, Alia peered down reluctantly. Orbiting a fat yellow star buried deep in the rich tangle of the Sagittarius Arm, this was a rust-brown ball surrounded by an extravagant flock of moons. It was an unprepossessing sight, even for a planet. The air was dense and thick and laden with fat gray clouds; it was like looking into a murky pond. The land was rust-colored and all but featureless, the only “mountains” worn stubs, the valleys the meandering tracks of sluggish rivers. There were oceans but so shallow that the world’s predominant ruddy color showed through. And there were still more peculiar landscapes, such as huge circles of some glassy, glinting material.

There was life, though. It showed up in patches of gray-green flung across the face of the crimson deserts — managed life, as you could see by its sharp edges, and the neat bright blue circles and ellipses of reservoirs. Alia made out the grayish bubbling of urban developments around these agricultural sites.

The planet had a catalog number, assigned to it on its rediscovery by the Commonwealth. And it had a name: Case, a blunt title that, it was said, dated back to the days before the Exultants’ victory, when this place, close to the outer edge of the spiral arm, had been a significant war zone. Alia wondered vaguely if “Case” had been a hero of that forgotten war. But, Reath said, the locals didn’t use either the official name or the catalog number; they just called their world, reasonably enough, the “Rustball.”

As they orbited, Reath patiently taught her to read this planet.

The thick air, and the worn, low mountains, were symptoms of high gravity, he said: though this world was only a little larger than Earth, its surface gravity was much higher than standard, and so it must be denser. And that rust color was the color of iron oxides — literally rust.

If the world looked old, so it was. The Galaxy, mother of the stars, was at its most fecund before Earth’s sun was even formed. So humans moving out from Earth had found themselves in a sky full of old worlds, like children tiptoeing through the dusty rooms of a dilapidated mansion.

As for those glassy plains, said Reath, they were not strange geological features but the relics of war, a bloody tide that had washed over this world again and again.

After a day, a ship came climbing sluggishly out of the planet’s steep gravity well. The shuttle, fat, flat, round, had the rust color of the planet of its origin, and reminded Alia of a huge insect, a toiling beetle. Even before it arrived, Alia felt a deepening disappointment.

The two crafts established an interface, and a tunnel opened up between them. Three men came drifting through into the roomier confines of Reath’s ship. “Welcome to the Rustball,” one of the visitors said. He introduced himself and his companions as Campoc Bale, Campoc Denh, and Campoc Seer. “Reath has asked us to host you.”

Reath nodded.

The Campocs were squat, all of them a head shorter than Alia, with thick, powerful-looking limbs. Though their costumes were a bright blue, their skin seemed to have something of the murky crimson-brown color of the Rustball itself, and their heads were as hairless and round as the planet of their birth. When they smiled Alia saw they didn’t have discrete teeth but enameled plates that stretched around the curves of their jaws.