One advantage of reading too much old science fiction is that your head becomes stocked with concepts to help make sense of such obscure hints. Suddenly I saw it. “Shit,” I said. “You’re saying that the Order was a hive mind. Is that it?”

“There wasn’t much mind about it,” he said. “I don’t know what the hell it was. I’m no sociobiologist. But I can tell you this. It wasn’t a human community. ” He tapped his manuscript again. “It’s all in there. And you know what? It was all an off-shoot of our family, from a deep root that seems to go back to the time of ancient Rome itself. Our family. That’s how Rosa got drawn into it. That’s how I did, I guess.”

No wonder Rosa had been intrigued by the strange collective organization of the Reef, I thought. I forced a grin. “You do always say we’re a funny lot.”

“And so we are.” His face was dark. “And now it’s happening again.”

“What is?”

“I once had a friend who helped me figure this stuff out. It’s in here.” He leafed through the manuscript, looking for a passage toward the end. “Here it is. The great events of the past — the fall of Rome, say, or the Second World War — cast long shadows, influencing generations to come. But is it possible that the future has echoes in the present, too?… I thought I saw the future of mankind in that hole in the ground in Rome, Michael. Or a future. I can’t say I liked what I saw. And maybe now it’s happening again, with you and Morag. Echoes of the future in the present.”

“But why now? Why us?” I didn’t quite want to say, why me?

“Maybe because we seem to be at a dangerous time in our history, Michael.” He looked at the back of his hand, poked at skin stained brown by age. “You know, when I was a kid I think I never believed I would grow old, like this. I was never interested in gardening, because I thought I would never live to see a tree grow tall. You know why? The threat of nuclear war, of extinction in a flash. It hung over my whole childhood like a black cloud. But the hard rain never fell, and eventually the cloud went away.

“Now a new cloud has gathered over us, every bit as dark and threatening as before. We’re at another tipping point in human history. And who is here trying to show us how to keep our balance? You are, Michael. A Poole. Who else?”

“And you think that’s why I’m getting these visitations?”

He reached out to touch my hand, but my VR presence made that impossible, and he pulled back. “Think about it. If you’re right about this hydrate threat — and if you manage to lead the drive to stop it wiping us out — then you will be remembered as one of the most important humans who ever lived. Now, if I was a time traveler from the future, this would be exactly the kind of era I would be drawn to, and you would be exactly the kind of person I’d long to meet.”

“Shit.” I remembered that Gea had said something similar, so had Rosa — so had George himself, when he talked about the strange circumstances of my birth, the coincidence of the discovery of the Kuiper Anomaly. Suddenly I felt extraordinarily self-conscious, as if a corridor a thousand centuries long had opened up before me, and a million eyes were fixed greedily on my every move.

“George, if this is true, what should I do about it?”

He shrugged. “Just accept it. I mean, it makes no difference. You just have to do your best even so, don’t you?”

“I guess.”

We just sat for a while. Then I said, “It’s morning in Alaska. I ought to go to work.” I stood. “Can I come visit tomorrow?”

“Of course.” As my VR broke up, as his room turned transparent around me, I saw him in his chair, smiling, waving a gaunt hand, his fingers bent over and stiff.

As it happened the next day we hit a problem with the Higgs-field power plant of the moles, and I was kept too busy to get away. The following day was worse. By the third day I was putting off going to see George; I didn’t want to get immersed in all that difficulty again. Tomorrow, I told myself. Or the day after that.

I never saw him again. A week after that last visit, John called to tell me George was dead.

Even at full speed the journey back to the Nord took two full days.

The sisters spent their time alone, shut away from the Campocs and from Reath. Alia didn’t want to talk to anybody else but Drea. She didn’t want Bale; she couldn’t bear the thought of him touching her. And she certainly didn’t want to join in the Campocs’ group consciousness, that pale echo of the Transcendence. She didn’t even want Poole, in his Witnessing tank.

To get through this, she felt, she had to retreat into herself, become again the woman she had once been. She had to be Alia. So the sisters sat together, limbs entwined, as they used to when they were small.

But her feelings were complicated.

Alia found herself thinking that if Drea had not been here, then her sister would surely have been on the Nord and shared the still unknown fate of her parents. And if that had happened, Alia would be alone. Then she was wracked by guilt that she seemed to spend so much time thinking of herself, rather than about those who had been hurt. If she was so shallow, so self-obsessed, then how could she possibly imagine she could deal with a Transcendence?

It made it worse that they had no real news. The fragmentary reports from Nord were little more than a cry for help. As the long hours wore on, that uncertainty was impossible to bear.

Drea thought Alia could ask the Transcendence.

“You could talk to the Campocs,” Drea whispered. “They might be able to contact Leropa. Or Reath might have a way to contact another Transcendent community, nearer to the Nord. For all I know there might even be a Transcendent or two on the Nord… ”

Alia knew that was too simple. Drea still thought of the Transcendence as a kind of comms network, as if the Transcendents themselves were nothing but monitoring stations, their eyes cameras. But the Transcendence was more than that. The Transcendence was literally beyond human imagination. Indeed Alia herself didn’t have the words to express it. The only way to understand the Transcendence, she thought sadly, was to be part of it, as she had been, and even if she never went back to it again, there would always be a gulf between herself and her sister.

But, she felt instinctively, the Transcendence was not a place to seek help at a time of human crisis.

At last Reath alerted them that their journey was over.

The ailing Nord was surrounded by a multitude of craft, compact or slender, robust or delicate. The crowding visitors had come to give aid, Reath assured the sisters. “Your Nord has many friends.”

“But at least one enemy,” Drea said bleakly.

As they approached, cautiously picking their way through the crowd of ships and darting shuttles, their view became clearer. And even from a distance, Alia could see the Nord had been grievously harmed. The squat cylinder that was the core of the Nord’s architecture had survived — it would take the outright demolition of the ship to destroy that — but huge energies had been splashed against the hull, leaving blackened scars and deep notches cut into the Nord’s blunt symmetry. Away from the ancient core the superstructure of habs, antennae, sensors, and manipulators was tangled, as if a great wind had torn through that fragile artificial forest.

Some of the Nord’s ports were still functioning, at least. The semi-sentient machinery of the dock interfaced with the shuttle routinely, but a bit hesitantly, Alia thought. Perhaps machines could suffer shock, too.

The shuttle wouldn’t let them out until they donned face masks and gloves. Inside the Nord there were stretches of vacuum, and even where there was air it was likely full of toxins. With dread Alia pulled on her mask, the mask she had once worn to go into a Coalescence; it was terribly hard to have to don protective gear to enter your own home.