Jacqui pulled out her qPad and searched.

‘Alternate runic alphabets,’ she said. ‘They sort of coexisted, and mingled.’

‘Coincidence.’ Lucas could not believe how far they were pushing this. ‘Fracture lines of some kind.’

‘Energy comes from where?’ Luda stepped back, taking the metal shard with her, and the red fluorescence dimmed to almost nothing. ‘See?’

She pushed the metal inside her pocket.

‘One hour, we meet my friend,’ she added. ‘Important. All of us, OK?’

Lucas looked at Jacqui. On one level, they were here on holiday, long-lost family members a side issue, and never mind dark auras. But this . . .

It seemed like fantasy, but last year’s cyberattack that took out the gamma-ray burster data around the globe, that had been real and had originated from somewhere. Perhaps from the country that pioneered clandestine cyberwarfare, while allowing everyone else to think China went first.

He wondered how many of the academics here were sponsored by the FSB.

They trudged along paths in the snow to a tram platform, and rode the thing into the city. There they changed twice and ended up in a wide dark street, where a blank door led downwards into a cellar-level nightclub with primary-colour spotlights whirling and music throbbing. They found seats in a darkened booth. Lucas fetched four vodkas from the bar, because of the friend they were due to meet, and when he returned to the table, the guy was already there.

He was overweight and heavily bearded, and placing a small wrapped package on the tabletop.

What the hell are we mixed up in?

Conspiracies abroad. FSB. Dark auras and museum trinkets. Anti-jetlag meds that messed with your head.

Some holiday.

Unwrapped, the package contained a crystal spearhead, its dimensions the same as the sample back at the university. The nameless friend rewrapped it and slid it to Luda, who tapped her qPad – she had already logged in to her bank account – and thanked him.

They exchanged farewells in Russian, and the guy left.

‘We leave something behind,’ said Luda, raising her vodka, ‘when we steal original. Is duplicate, right? Ordinary quartz.’

‘When we—?’

‘And you smuggle out of country, dear cousin.’

‘That’s insane,’ said Lucas.

‘You can count on us,’ said Jacqui.

Truly insane, except that he had known, from the moment he saw the red fluorescence, that he was meant to safeguard the crystal, for some purpose he might never know, besides keeping the woman he loved happy, not to mention his new-found cousin and their shared synaesthetic . . . experiences. Whatever. Right now, he planned to keep on drinking vodka until things made sense or he stopped caring; but when it came to paranoid-schizophrenic conspiracies, one thing was already clear.

He would have to stop blaming the meds.

*

They flew back next to a couple called Gerald and Virginia (call me Ginny) Hawke, two aerospace engineers in the process of moving from Seattle to Los Angeles, Gerald to take up a teaching position at UCLA and Ginny – ‘for the time being’ – to be a mother: the swelling of her abdomen was scarcely visible.

The meds or forgetfulness must have affected birth-control measures as well as rational thought, because the following autumn, Jacqui would produce a daughter just two months after the Hawkes produced their son. They would become friends, and their children would go to school together; and there would often be joint celebrations at Brody and Amy’s place, Thanksgiving included.

From time to time across the years, Lucas would experience an unfocused feeling, a notion that he was obliged to send the crystal spearhead into the future, just as he had the graphene flake. It was not until the birth of his and Jacqui’s first grand-child, when he decided it was time finally to write a will and work out who should own the crystal when he was gone, that he realised he was carrying the thing forward, at the same rate that everyone else in the world was engaged in time travel.

One minute per minute, one day at a time.

TWENTY-ONE

VACHSS STATION, VIJAYA ORBIT, 2604 AD

Labyrinth was the link, Roger realised, as he and his wonderful ship burst into realspace in the vicinity of his destination, Vachss Station. He had time to spare before contacting the orbital became mandatory. At this distance, it would not challenge him for ten minutes: that was protocol, though one in need of revision, given the existence and unknown intentions of Schenck and his renegade Pilot fleet.

Roger allowed himself to drift in a disjunctive trance, having released conjunction with his beloved ship, needing to think by himself.

It has to be Labyrinth.

The city world itself, when he had been granted a day’s leave from Tangleknot, had prompted him to visit the Logos Library, where Ro McNamara had granted him insight into past events unknown to all but the most dedicated history scholars. And his beautiful ship was grown parthenogenetically with Labyrinth’s connivance, heir to his father’s ship but not identical to it, with latent memories only just becoming accessible to Roger now that he-and-ship were far from home, on their first operational mission.

He had access to knowledge that no one would expect him to have, giving him a different perspective on the events he was caught up in – a perspective predisposing him to take action, he assumed, in ways that Labyrinth itself would approve of.

Perhaps it was the clearly benign nature of the city-world that made questioning its purpose seem pointless; or perhaps even Pilotkind possessed mental blindspots.

Whether this trip had hidden objectives or was simply the jaunt it appeared to be – Jed was clearly not guilty of the original charges, and the Vachss Station authorities just needed to complete the formalities and release him into another Pilot’s temporary, nominal care – he would try to work out later. For now, it was the newly uncovered secret memories that occupied his attention.

The first sequence of Dad’s memory had come to Roger shortly after leaving Labyrinth, as he-and-ship entered the violet-edged vastness that was Spiderblood Drift.

sequence [[[

Fear and hysteria, laughing and crying as he drifts in blazing space amid a billion suns, a thin quickglass suit protecting him from vacuum, while he is overwhelmed by the beauty of the galactic core.

Oh, my love. I’ve missed you.

She is coming, he knows.

My name is Carl Blackstone, and I’m alive!

It is the desperate presumption of a mote, the ego struggling to maintain existence within transcendent immensity, as he revolves and the thousand-lightyear needle comes into view, the jet spurting from the galaxy’s heart, the first time any Pilot or human has seen the thing with a chance of reporting back on its existence.

Everyone else witnessing the jet has been suborned by the darkness.

Or they have died.

]]]

It had been a disconcerting memory-flash, a prelude to a detailed remembrance of events happening to his father ten subjective days before he was set adrift to die.

sequence [[[

Fairwell Rotunda, one of the lobbies within the thirteen-deck structure: that is the rendezvous point. Carl Blackstone watches several tourists admire the deep-orange quickglass opulence, but by the standards of Pneumos City this is something of a dive: the visitors just aren’t used to Molsin’s superior standards.

He likes this world.

Churchgoers are celebrating a quiet ceremony – most likely praying for a safe voyage – in a small group in the corner. Their foreheads are tattooed with three glistening dots that form an equilateral triangle enclosing a golden symbol: γ. This is the five hundred and seventh anniversary, according to his tu-ring, of the mythical event that eventually produced the Church of Equilateral Redemption, a cult so small that Carl is surprised to find the knowledge-base entry.