Those regions, naturally enough, would need to be inside a human brain: a human whose normal brain could interact with the world, while selected neural cliques and groups experienced timeflow emanating from the future, allowing memories of future perceptions to be remembered in the present.

All you needed was a temporary abeyance of humanist ethics.

And children on whose brains you could operate.

*

Now, five years later, it boiled down to this: thirteen members of the nobility standing on an internal balcony halfway up the wall of a lab chamber, twenty or so research assistants moving around, and eight drooling youngsters: the proto-Oracles.

These were aged between seven and seventeen standard years, some with left and right eyes that moved independently, all largely confined to couches from which they observed ceaseless holo footage. Three of them could speak with some coherence.

‘Steam. Pudding. Good to . . .day . . .’ came from a ten-year-old girl.

‘Timeline is thirteen days in the future.’ An assistant checked displays. ‘Location is right here.’

A sarcastic laugh sounded from the rear of the visiting group. At the forefront, Lord Welkin, oldest of the investors, was frowning. ‘With respect, sir,’ he told Lord Alvix, ‘this is pitiful. The paltriness of your servitors’ menu is hardly a worthy—’

But Alvix stopped the complaint confidently.

‘It would have been too much coincidence, sir,’ he said, ‘had one of them just happened to deliver useful information as you stood here.’

‘And when, my Lord, do you actually foresee gaining useful information?’

At the rear of the group, another laugh: it was Archduke Colwyn.

But Alvix had a reply ready, though it might cost him Welkin’s support.

‘We learned something a tenday ago,’ he said to Welkin. ‘Seven years and twenty-three days from now, my Lord, which is to say Dvaday the thirty-seventh of Jyu, a Convocation in Shantzu Province will rule on the dissolution of your cousin Lord Cheung’s demesne. By the end of Jyu-ni, his neighbours will have divided up his realm among themselves.’

Welkin went pale, at least in part (Kenna was almost sure, to a probability of 96.3 per cent) because he was party to the conspiracy that would in due course break up his cousin’s realm. But the other Lords and Ladies, to judge by their microexpressions and skin lividity, were rationally assessing the situation, and revealing a tentative approval.

In some metatemporal sense, the future has already happened; and that being so, they wanted to know about it, whatever details they could pick up.

But Kenna knew something else that Lord Alvix was aware of yet had not divulged. One of the more coherent proto-Oracles, the girl called Mandia, had spoken of the Collegium Delphinorum, a place that did not yet exist, and which (from interpreting Mandia’s fragments of information) seemed to be some future facility – or group of facilities – for creating and managing better Oracles in the future.

In one sense, it implied success for this venture, but those scraps of report made no mention of Demesne Avernon.

Perhaps this was knowledge that Kenna herself should be acting on.

Isn’t foreknowledge the reason I’m here?

Perhaps it was time she made plans to leave Demesne Avernon, and found a place for herself in one of the deep interstitial regions of Nulapeiron, far from other realms and their ambitious schemes.

Time to change herself once more.

THIRTY-THREE

MAGNUS & THE WORLD, 5575 AD

Seeker learned that the obsidian-eyed woman had a name, which he rendered as Maree Delgasso in flux-speech. She was a Pilot, one able to voyage among the stars (though Ideas regarding golden space were not yet decipherable), descendant of a line of Pilots that stretched back some one hundred and twenty generations.

Pilots had existed for longer than there had been people on the World; and yet it seemed they had common ancestry, soft-fleshed people like the folk whom the Pilots bore as passengers in their magnificent living vessels.

The Pilots lived according to a code called the Tri-Fold Way, and were amused, as they explored the World, at the three sexes and three-way symmetry of ‘native’ species, such as flying tri-blades . . . and at the failure of silver-skinned people, including Seekers, to deduce that their own ancestry was different, that the legend of the Ark had necessarily contained some truth.

But the Pilots’ philosophy, which impelled them towards peacefulness, apparently had a tragic origin.

**It came from healing, from the aftermath of war. Of so much death.**

The flux, though representing Maree’s words, emanated from the ring on her finger, mediated by a near-invisible mist. She was fascinated by the Ideas that Seeker-once-Harij captured, snagging them from the air. It made her eager to leave Magnus, and return the nine Seekers and Zirkana to the World.

**Not just to get you home, but to investigate this wonderful air. Some kind of airborne ferrimagnetic colloid, perhaps . . .**

Her musings had the flavour of some of those old Ideas, captured by wandering Seekers.

Other Pilots descended in bubbles to enter and commune with the old vessel that had taken the Seekers and Zirkana here. Finally, a pair of huge ships moved in overhead – Seeker was fascinated at their living forms, the way they could stretch and twist – and reached down with gentle tendrils to embrace the older vessel.

Gently, gently they lifted her from the sands, carried her up into the black star-powdered sky, and disappeared as Seeker-once-Harij watched.

**What happened to them?**

**They entered the golden ocean, my friend. A void where we can fly fast, and take her to a city where she can heal, that old ship.**

**And fly her again?**

Something shifted in Maree’s black-on-black eyes.

**Her Pilot is long dead. When she is well, she will simply slip away, as all ships do when they are bereft. Where they go, we do not know, and must never ask. **

**Your people are so strange.**

Maree reached out and touched the back of his hand.

**Your silver skin is strange also. That old ship transformed you, your ancestors, when she crashed upon the World.**

**She crashed?**

**And was broken, but healed as best she could. Your world was not hospitable.**

So much to combine with other Ideas, so much for the Seekers to share with the World.

**But for now, Seeker, it is time for us to take you home. Do you trust us?**

Zirkana came walking, her skin shining purest silver, absolutely radiant.

**This is so wonderful. Wait until Starij and the rest get to meet them!**

Seeker took Zirkana’s hands in his, and turned back to Maree.

**We trust you. Can you find the way?**

**The old ship gave us the location**

They called everyone together, getting ready for the return. Before they rose to her ship, Maree had a question for Seeker-once-Harij:

**You’re known as Seekers. Does it ever stop? Will returning like this mean the end of your careers?**

But Seeker-once-Harij had his arm around Zirkana, and his smile was serene as he cast his reply.

**I have already found what I Sought.**

Maree looked at them both, and smiled.

Then she summoned transport bubbles to carry them aloft to her waiting ship.

THIRTY-FOUR

MU-SPACE, 2606 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)

Commodore Max Gould was not a well man, in Pavel’s estimation. Ever since the attack or breakdown or whatever it was – no one was forthcoming with the medical history of the intelligence service’s director – Max had spent fewer hours in the Admiralty and more time by himself. The Admiralty Council had surprised Pavel by making his own position permanent, so that he was officially the deputy director; and Max had compounded that by handing over much of the running of the service, including some of the most strategically important and sensitive operations.