No one railed at her for long. Fatigue and hunger were met-amorphosing into lethargy, and soon enough they would be unable to do anything as their bodies shut down and that was that: the end of them. But they were Seekers, and one Seeker’s wife, and they could summon composure if nothing else.

Eight Seekers sat cross-legged in a circle, hands joined as they entered flux-trance, chins on chests and drooping forwards as their strength failed, sinking fast inside themselves, preparing. Lying apart from them, Seeker-once-Harij and Zirkana clasped each other, merging their thoughts.

**I love you.**

But death would soon be here.

Whether Seeking carried with it a sense of fatalism, Zirkana could not quite say, but she alone roused herself at the tiniest pinprick of distant energies, of disturbance propagated only faintly through the insulating medium of air, this strange dead air that Magnus possessed. She squeezed Seeker-once-Harij, who roused himself – it would be so easy to slip back into sleep – and forced himself to move, to shake the other Seekers into wakefulness.

And slowly, painfully, to shuffle to the exit and down the ramp.

Standing on the silver sand, they watched a huge vessel – or was it a creature? – move slowly in the night sky. Then, with twin bursts of pure white light, two more craft burst into being. All three bore some kind of resemblance to the ancient ship that brought them here; but they were different also, slowly morphing in shape, uncurling external tendrils, billowing gently.

From them, streams of bubbles began to descend.

**What are they, Harij?**

**I don’t know, my love.**

But each bubble, as it approached the ground, clearly contained a person. Or rather, a near human lacking silver skin. Seeker-once-Harij felt none of the panic that he experienced with the other soft-skinned beings – no sense of abomination, of that inhuman group mind – and Seeker-once-captive looked equally calm. That was good, because it took the last of their energy simply to stand here and wait.

For whatever was about to happen.

Each bubble, as it touched the sand, dissolved. Its former occupant walked clear. When there were some thirty folk gathered, they walked slowly forward, approaching the Seekers and Zirkana; and then they halted.

Seeker-once-Harij cast a greeting.

Two of the strangers moved their mouths in an odd fashion. One had ordinary human eyes (perhaps lacking protective membrane) despite the soft skin; the other’s eyes were pure black: polished obsidian.

**Communication.**

That was the oldest Seeker, searching his memory for Ideas, then touching each of his fellows in turn with his fingertips, sharing his thinking: words without flux, nevertheless cast upon the air. But the two newcomers looked to be thinking equally hard, blinking as if at sights only they could see – and suddenly the black-eyed stranger, surely a woman, raised her hand and a silvery mist spread outwards – from her ring, Seeker-once-Harij thought – and spanned the gap between her and the nine Seekers plus Zirkana.

This time, when her mouth moved, the mist came alive with blazing flux.

**GREETINGS!**

The Seekers staggered, and Seeker-once-Harij tripped and fell backwards, thumping into the ground. Zirkana went down on one knee beside him, but he was laughing; and after a moment, she was laughing too.

Seeker-once-captive managed to keep composure and reply.

**Greetings.**

But they were all smiling, even the soft-skinned beings, even the ones standing well back. This was a strange world and they did not know each other, but there was a sense only of warmth, of the possibility of friendship; and so long as no one did anything stupid, that was how things would proceed. Seeker-once-Harij was sure of it.

The World was going to be different now.

TWENTY-FIVE

NULAPEIRON, 2604-2657 AD

For fifty-three years, the system self-identified as Kenna was immobile. It existed as a network of components embedded in a wall deep inside Palace Avernon, itself located in the Primum Stratum of Demesne Avernon, some hundred metres below ground. Then, towards the end of that fifty-third year, Kenna decided that it was female once more.

Her internal computation had upgraded with the addition of neuropeptide-analogues, so that she manifested emotional cognition, the gut-think which comprises a huge portion of human neural processing; and that meant it was time to begin reconfiguring herself into a human personality. Choosing a gender was a major step, so she searched the standard human classification that reduced the choice to only thirty-five options; from among them she picked a feminine-tough trope-complex not dissimilar to the former Rhianna Chiang.

The old Duke Avernon, the first and best of them, would have approved of her choice.

‘Fear is literally felt in the stomach,’ he had told her once, ‘and heartache in the heart. Peptide flow in organs forms the third nervous system. Descartes would have got it right,’ he had added, ‘if he’d said cogito capioque, ergo sum. From capere, meaning to feel, experience, charm and suffer. A fetching semantic spectrum, don’t you think?’

She missed the Duke, such a contrast to the grandson ruling now. Lord Dalgen Avernon (his father had relinquished duchy status, to reduce the demesne’s tax liability) of the flighty mind and political ambition, saw himself as worldly-wise, rather than simply worldly.

Or so she thought until she watched him poring over the spacedrone experiment results, the laboratory chambers filled with holo diagrams, with billowing phase-spaces and five-dimensional lattices of linked, glowing equations. Her pseudo-face was embedded in the wall of the largest chamber, but over the years, this Avernon had grown to think of her as a decorative mounted sculpture rather than a cognitively functional, though immobile, cyborg.

She encouraged that notion by remaining silent during his devious political planning sessions.

This new experimental work, however, was based on log osophical research initiated by Avernon’s forebears and continued by current members of l’Academia Ultima, which sometimes lived up to its name. The investigation harked back to the old mystery of time’s arrow, to the time symmetry of ‘fundamental’ equations describing the natural universe, and their failure to identify the three aspects of timeflow: the moving reality of past, present and future. But the work was not just theory and laboratory experiments.

Something odd was happening in the vicinity of Nulapeiron.

The initial results had come from experiments on board drones placed in orbits of different radii around Nulapeiron, orbits chosen almost at random. Some of the results matched predictions, but others showed strange yet consistent deviations. To investigate, the researchers had commissioned more spacedrones – something most people in Nulapeiron would not dream of, given their mental blindspots regarding the uninhabitable surface, never mind what laid beyond – until there were shoals of the things, orbiting at all sorts of distances from the surface, allowing a clear mapping of the phenomenon.

Producing unambiguous readings, but not understanding.

The heart of it was a set of reactions in the spacedrones’ cores, which produced the usual spray of short-lived particles and resonances – so far, so good. But in some locations, there were too many kaons extant. Unexciting to the average person, deeply troubling to the researchers.

An imbalance occurred strongly within a kilometre-wide shell some hundred thousand kilometres from the centre of Nulapeiron; outside of that shell, subatomic reality behaved as normal. But for seven hundred years, that normality had been known to possess an inexplicable feature.