Dirk McNamara had confirmed for ever his reputation as a war admiral par excellence, the greatest in Pilot history. If it were not for the renegades assumed to be under Schenck’s command, the populace of Labyrinth would have assumed that peace would reign in mu-space for a very long time.

The Chaos Conflict was over.

But the mystery of the Zajinets’ destination remained.

FORTY-SEVEN

EARTH, 1989 AD

Chilly sky and green grass: morning on Hampstead Heath, dogs running and playing with tongue-baring joy, and a man in a tweed overcoat walking past, shamrock in his lapel. It was the 17th of March and three years since Rupert’s death, and Gavriela missed him dreadfully. She watched the dogs and the people, hoping their lives felt fulfilled.

For herself, Carl visited seldom – she got on better with her grandson Brody, in many ways – and her friends were mostly books, in the elegant Chelsea house she had inherited with surprise from Rupert. Rupert’s collection was in many ways the greatest gift he could have given her, in lieu of his continued presence on the Earth.

She hoped Brody was revising with diligence for his O-levels.

Where did the years—?

Something ripped inside her skull.

After the stroke, learning to write again was hard. She had been one of the first to use a Compaq, however, revelling in the concept of a suitcase-shaped computer whose bottom end detached to form a keyboard and reveal a phosphor screen. Apart from the PDP11s in Imperial, she had grown used to the idea of plumbed-in mainframes with water cooling, and air conditioned atmosphere to ensure no dust-particle could ever slip between a disk and its read-write head.

It had got to the stage where ordinary consumers were buying computers, though what they intended to do with them, Gavriela had little idea. Most people did not appreciate what a universal Turing machine actually was, never mind possessing the expertise to program it. To own a computer yet be unable to code seemed like illiteracy.

But hunt-and-peck on the keyboard enabled her to write, slowly at first, and then to participate on BBSs for the first time, discovering pen-pals in this new medium, no programming involved. In real life, her speech and thought remained clear, which was a blessing; but her legs were weak, and her new best friend was the electric wheelchair she steered with a joystick, and which Brody informed her was brilliant, like a pilot flying a Spitfire: he always cheered her up.

Then there was Ingrid, her live-in nurse, on whom Gavriela depended, at first without seeing her as a friend – Ingrid’s manner could be brusque – while being grateful that Rupert continued to look after her from beyond the grave, because she could never have afforded Ingrid otherwise.

There was something liberating in accepting one’s own helplessness, in recognising that however self-focused she had been in her life, it was all right for her to depend on someone else. She would have liked to explain this to her exuberant grandson, but it was not right that Brody should know of such things: let him be optimistic and blind to his mortality, while he was young.

In the summer, when Brody’s exams were over, he came to stay for the full six weeks of the holiday. With her, he could discuss his obsessions – with physics and physical culture (as Gavriela thought of it), the former approved of by his father, the latter remaining secret. Gavriela talked to Ingrid, who told her that the old notion of muscle-bound introverts was untrue. The upshot was Gavriela’s purchase, via Ingrid, of a set of weights for her grandson: blue plastic things and a shining chrome bar that nearly gave the delivery man a hernia, or so he said.

What neither Gavriela nor Brody talked about was Carl’s impending marriage – at the age of forty-seven, for pity’s sake – and the way he had cut Anna Gould out of his life, and appeared to be doing the same to their son, Brody. No doubt Carl had his own story and justifications, but in the absence of explanation, Gavriela was treating his actions as unforgivable.

Or perhaps it was simply that Gavriela was a better grandmother than a mother, getting it right the second time around. Either way, she smiled at the huffing and puffing that came from Brody’s room every day, the occasional thump of weights on the floor, and the vast quantities of milk he drank.

More significantly, the day after Brody received his O-level results, mostly grade 1s, Gavriela despatched Ingrid to Foyle’s – at some point, Ingrid had become more than nurse, simply by setting no boundaries on what she was willing to do to help – to buy the three-volume Feynman lectures, the famous red books which she warned Brody would be too hard for him at first, but inspirational.

‘There’s, er, something else,’ he said one night in the drawing room – a term he found as amusing as she did – while the credits were rolling on the Conan movie. ‘You know those letters . . .’

Gavriela touched the joystick on her wheelchair, rotating a little to face him. Of course she had wondered about the letters arriving three times a week or more, but she had patience.

‘Her name’s Amy,’ he went on. ‘Amy Stelanko and she’s from Iowa and Dad doesn’t like her but I do. Her dad, she calls him Pop, works over here, except they’ll be going back when I’m in the Upper Sixth.’

Gavriela’s friend Jane from Imperial had married the boy she went out with at school, and remained happy. So Gavriela took Brody seriously, instead of dismissing a teen romance.

‘Things will be tough,’ she said. ‘When she goes back.’

And at a time when Brody would be concentrating on his A-levels, or should be.

‘I do want to go to Uni, Gran,’ he said. ‘Mr Stelanko said that if I apply to Cornell or somewhere, then he’ll help me.’

‘Living in a foreign country, that’s really tough.’

‘Oh.’ Brody sank in on himself. ‘Right.’

For the first time he looked like the sulky teenager his father had been.

‘Which means you’ll need my help,’ said Gavriela. ‘And you get that under one condition.’

Brody’s face cleared.

‘You need to bring Amy round here,’ Gavriela went on. ‘I want to meet the thief who stole my grandson’s heart.’

Blushing and laughing, Brody agreed.

Amy turned out to be a wonderful girl, pretty and smart and interested in psychology, and who listened, wide eyed and riveted, as Gavriela told her about meeting Sigmund Freud a long time ago. Then she told Amy she was welcome to come back any time, and she meant it.

When the end of summer came, Gavriela’s sense of heartache grew large as she realised just how much Brody’s presence had brightened her world. With a shock, as he came into the drawing-room dressed in T-shirt and jeans on the evening before leaving, she realised he had turned from a boy into a muscular young man during just six weeks.

‘I’m over two stone heavier,’ he told her. ‘Fourteen kilos, and hardly any fat.’

Clearly the weights and the milk had come at just the right time in his development. They talked over the logistics of getting his boxed-up weights sent home, then the conversation trailed off, until Gavriela found herself saying. ‘We’ve talked about your future, but there are some things I’d like to tell you about. I mean my past.’

‘Dad says . . .’ Brody shrugged his now-bulky shoulders. ‘He says you had a tough time of things, and won’t ever talk about it.’

Gavriela guessed Carl had worded it differently.

‘There’s a great deal I’ve never been able to share,’ she said. ‘My war work was classified, but people are starting to learn about Alan Turing and Enigma, though much of it will stay secret for a lot longer than—’

‘Bletchley Park?’ said Brody. ‘You mean you worked there?’

‘We called it BP, and I certainly did . . .’