It struck Alia how Leropa was different. Of all this shuffling crowd of ancients, it was only she who seemed even aware of Alia’s presence.

“What are you thinking, Alia?”

“All I see is what’s missing. There is nothing here. No art. No music—”

Leropa grimaced. “Can you imagine a single piece of art that wouldn’t appal you after a hundred viewings, a piece of music or verse of poetry that, after a thousand years of listening, wouldn’t sicken you with boredom? The very abstract endures longest, I suppose. Cold, voiceless music; pale inhuman art. But in time everything wears away, Alia. Everything visible turns to dust — and so you turn to what remains, the invisible.”

“What’s inside you.”

“Yes. The present is just a surface of sensation surrounding a great bubble of memory. You forget how to see, to hear; you forget how to talk to people. You forget other people even exist. You just sink inward into yourself, thinking about the past. Living on and on, without end.”

“And yet you do live on.”

“Oh, yes.”

These ancient figures, and the wisdom they had accreted, were the treasures of mankind, in a sense, and the foundation of the Transcendence, and so they were cherished. But not envied.

Leropa said, “I understand this repels you. I have seen such a reaction many times before — an instinctive loathing, the rejection all young feel for all old. It is the natural order of things. But you will come round. The alternative to living on and on is, after all, death. And we do have some value, you know.”

Leropa reached out and, without warning, touched Alia’s forehead. Her touch was cold.

And suddenly Alia was standing on top of a mountain, drenched in cold air that dragged at her lungs. She stumbled and wrapped her arms around her body.

Leropa watched her dispassionately. “You’ll be fine,” she said.

Alia’s systems, suffused by Mist, adjusted to the shock. The feeling of cold, of vertigo, went away. She stood straight, composing herself.

She was on a plateau no more than a hundred paces across, smoothly cut from the summit of this steep-sided mountain. Walls of granite fell away to valleys far below, and the ground was folded into more mountains on all sides. The rock was slippery underfoot; there might be no ice left at Earth’s poles, but there was ice up here.

An immense barrel of some cold blue metal pointed up out of the rock of this summit, straight up at the sky. It was monumental, many times her own height. It was obviously a weapon.

“Where am I?”

“Does it matter?” Leropa’s thin lips pulled back into a smile. “Ah, but you have Witnessed the career of Michael Poole, haven’t you? In his day these mountains were known as the Pyrenees.”

“Did we Skim here?”

“Everybody Skims everywhere, on Earth. The people continue to burn up the planet’s energy store as if it were inexhaustible. You must have seen the floating buildings, the way the whole planet glows from space. Earth has always stayed strong, you know. Even when the Coalition fell it was the capital of the strongest of the successor states. And through all the wars and vicissitudes since, it stayed safe, unharmed. We ensured it did.”

“We?” But Alia knew who she meant. The undying.

Leropa said, “And by staying strong, its people naturally became rich — even if the planet was bled of its own substance in the process. Those who have inherited the Earth live exotic lives, Alia. More exotic, more fantastic, more rich than a ship-born waif like you can imagine.”

Alia resented that. “Maybe. But if they have such rich lives how come they needed to come look at me?”

Leropa laughed, a dry, eerie sound, quite without humanity. “Perhaps you’re right. They caper on the wealth of ages. But they are bored; they are too ignorant not to be. And they are spoiled rotten.”

Alia looked up at the barrel of the weapon. “And what is this?”

“A weapon of war,” Leropa said. “In fact an ancient starbreaker cannon. It is at least three hundred thousand years old, but fully functional. It will probably last as long again.”

“What’s it doing here? Defense?”

“In a sense. Its sentience is programed to seek out and destroy any impactors — asteroids, comets — that might threaten the planet.”

Alia frowned. “Is that likely? This system’s asteroid belts are depleted.”

“True. An atmosphere-penetrating impact sufficient to cause significant damage is likely only once every million years: in Poole’s time it would have been once a century. And there are more defense perimeters in space.” Leropa glanced up at the weapon. “But this guardian is here even so. Of course the worst case would be a strike that took out this defender, and a second strike that would, undefended, do even more harm.”

“Surely that sort of multiple accident is almost vanishingly unlikely.”

“But a real risk nonetheless,” Leropa said. “And so I like to check this installation over, from time to time. This is why I showed you this installation; this is the protection we undying offer to the people of Earth. You understand, don’t you?”

“I think so…”

It was an elementary insight for a student of the Implication of Indefinite Longevity. The biggest difference in the perception of an undying was time itself. If you were an undying, you could expect to live so long that risks statistically negligible on the timescale of a normal human lifetime became significant. So a once-a-megayear risk of an asteroid strike in this cleaned-out, heavily defended system became worth thinking about, planning for.

If the species were to survive into the very far future, of course, such thinking was necessary. Mankind needed the undying, or at least their instincts for very long timescales. But it was a deadening, fearful perspective.

“And you feed all this caution into the Transcendence,” Alia said cautiously.

“The undying founded the Transcendence. The undying have always shaped it. How could it be otherwise?”

“But you old ones bring other baggage, don’t you?”

Leropa smiled. “Baggage? Ah, you mean regret — the driver behind the Redemption. At last we are getting to the point. You have doubts about the Redemption, don’t you, child? You think it is perhaps unhealthy. Obsessive. And you suspect there is more to it than mere Witnessing, don’t you?”

Alia felt weak before the force of personality of this ancient creature. But she gathered her courage. “I think there must be. Because Witnessing isn’t enough for atonement. ”

Leropa nodded approvingly. “Your intuition is sound. Witnessing is in fact only the First Level of Redemption, as defined by the Colleges. And, no, it isn’t thought to be sufficient. How could it be? Witnessing is for children.”

“What is the Second Level?”

“It is called the Hypostatic Union, ” Leropa said. “A union of substances, of essences. Do you know what that means?”

“No.”

“Then learn.” She reached out and once more, with a fingertip that was colder than ice, touched Alia’s forehead.

Alia fell into a bloody dark.

In the morning we gathered outside the hotel’s main entrance, ready to be taken to Makaay’s demonstration. The weather was cold but clear, the sky a pale blue. Tom was here with Sonia, and Shelley and her people, Makaay, and a number of EI workers, most of whom I hadn’t met before. Vander Guthrie was here. His blue hair, protruding out from under his fur cap, looked frankly ridiculous.

We huddled together, wrapped up in heavy fake-fur coats and Russian-style hats provided for us by EI. “We all look like bears,” Shelley joked, although there had been no bears in this area, polar or otherwise, for decades.

Awkwardly Tom and I embraced, father and son reunited in this industrial wasteland. Tom didn’t have much to say to me. I was still in the doghouse for daring to speak to Aunt Rosa, and I refrained from telling him about my nocturnal pursuit of his mother’s ghost. Business as usual. I got a kiss on the cheek from Sonia, however.