Her grandfather, Tom Corcorigan, loves the open air, so different from the tunnels of his youth. This is where he has said he wants to die.

Beside Alexa, her grey-eyed half-brother, Samson Gervicort, is as distraught as she is: they equally adore Grandfather Tom, who may be legendary to others, but to them is the most warm-hearted of real people, always gentle, and missing Elva dreadfully: Alexa and Samson’s grandmother, dead for almost a decade.

On Grandfather’s rug-covered lap, a neko-kitten with soft amber fur lies curled up, sleeping.

‘Grandfather,’ asks Samson. ‘Do we have things right?’

The old man is nearly gone, unable to open his eyes; but he raises a single finger slightly.

‘He means yes,’ says Alexa. ‘It is as it should be. This’ – blinking away tears – ‘is his moment.’

She takes his fragile hand—

You’ve done so much.

—and, as Samson turns away for a moment to blink away tears, she places her hand upon his forehead, and her tu-ring gleams. A virtual holo, her-eyes-only, shows the winking-out of a tiny point of light, deep inside Grandfather’s brain.

A spinpoint has just ceased to exist, from the viewpoint of ordinary time.

Or been created, to live all the way back to Tom Corcorigan’s conception, from a different way of considering things.

‘I love you, Grandfather,’ she says, and it is the truth.

‘I love you, Grandfather,’ says Samson, placing his hand on the dying man’s shoulder.

There is no mistaking the final breath, the last release of pressure, as life leaves the body.

Grandfather.

He is gone.

From a distant chamber, well appointed in smartmarble, two figures watched a giant holo of Corcorigan’s final moments, respectful and solemn, while approving of the finesse with which Alexa carried out her task.

‘It had to work out all right,’ said the claw-handed Pilot, his face half-covered in scar tissue. ‘It’s predestined, isn’t it?’

‘Careful,’ said Kenna beside him. ‘We skirt on the edge of paradox, and it’s so very, very dangerous.’

‘I know. It’s strange, to think of Tom Corcorigan and me, entangled in that way.’ He looked up at the holo. ‘We never talked, yet he was in a sense more a brother to me than Dirk.’

‘Never that, Kian.’ Kenna placed her crystalline hand upon his burnt one. ‘Your real family love you, even if they don’t understand.’

After the rescue from Siganth, thanks to Tom Corcorigan’s signal to Labyrinth, direct to Kian’s mother, Kian and his ship had remained in Labyrinth for several contiguous years, getting to know Dirk and Mother once more. But Kian’s political-philosophical effectiveness had depended on his time-skipping nomadic ways, while all three of them were infected by that same need to skip relativistically across the decades and centuries, to see how Pilotkind turned out. They were getting restless. With luck, they would see out the next three or four hundred years, until the Aeternal language, along with technology and culture, had changed so much that not even they could adapt to it.

As for Kenna, Kian had met her some seven decades earlier, two years after the Anomaly’s defeat on Nulapeiron, when official celebrations had declared the rescued planet part of the allied realspace worlds of humanity. Kian had hovered at the edge of a celebration that Tom Corcorigan had declined to take a starring role in, when ambassadors had gathered, and Ode to Victory had been played, and so on: the usual mix of solemnity and parade. When Kian, hooded and cloaked, had sneaked away, another hooded figure followed and she introduced herself to him.

Of course he had paid attention. ‘It’s not every day you get to meet a woman of living crystal,’ he told her later.

For all that, he was the only non-Kobold not to fall into awed trance in her presence, and she treasured his friendship, and the infrequent visits that followed.

Plus, there was a mystery that no one had resolved, and had been only deepened when Labyrinth herself had given Kian a piece of information that he understood was confidential, not to be shared, no matter how little information he extracted from the words.

=There is a bright seed in your brain.=

It was Kenna who deduced the implant’s nature: a spinpoint entangled with one other, an identical counterpart. And that partner was in Tom Corcorigan’s brain.

How else could Corcorigan’s journey along the hyperdimensions have deposited him precisely in the location where Kian was being held? Unexpected events had crowded upon everyone, and the Seer-mediated teleportation was known to have been directed to Siganth along the hyperdimensional channel used by the Anomaly, joining Siganth to Nulapeiron. Bizarre as the events might be, there was no mystery in Corcorigan’s destination being the hellworld; but no one had questioned the deeper coincidence, that he had ended up near the one hive-cell containing Kian.

The hidden entangled spinpoints had played a role in the fine details of hyperdimensional navigation, drawing one towards the other.

Now, a realtime holo showed the interior of Kian’s brain. As he and Kenna watched, smartbeams projected from the walls – like the ones generated by Alexa’s tu-ring – caused the shining white point inside his head, the other half of the entangled pair, to wink out of existence.

It was gone.

Except of course it was not extinction – it was the moment of the spinpoint’s birth, beginning its life backwards in time, all the way to Kian’s conception, when it would collapse. Dirk had grown from the same initial cell in the womb, but when the growing cells divided into two separate clumps, the spinpoint would have had to go along with the proto-Kian, not Dirk.

Was this a form of gross mechanical motion induced by future goals, teleology instead of cause-and-effect? Was it a veridical paradox, one that would be resolved by looking at it from a different perspective, with new knowledge? Or was it the real thing, an antinomy?

Even with the old aristocratic system on its knees if not extinct, such logosophical questions were a natural thing to ask here on Nulapeiron. Kenna and Kian smiled at each other, aware of how odd their friendship was, and the weirdness of the events that indirectly linked them.

‘What do you think happens eventually?’ asked Kian. ‘Do we win?’

In so many ways, they were both outsiders, with very different viewpoints. Though he was not trapped in hypnotic awe of Kenna, the way most people were, he thought she might be wisest being alive right now.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I hope so.’

There was nothing more to say then, as they watched the realtime holo showing a former Warlord’s grieving grandchildren, Alexa with the neko-kitten in her arms, and the flyers arriving at the quickglass tower, where soon enough the funeral would be held.

A good death, then.

If there could ever be such a thing.

FIFTY-SEVEN

MU-SPACE, 2608 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)

Autohypnosis is part of every Pilot’s education, but this is a key moment, important, so Corinne is glad to have medics around her for every minute, with Clara nearby – a close friend since peace came to Labyrinth and Corinne got to celebrate Roger’s memory with those who knew him, Jed Goran included. For over twenty tendays they have been close, and particularly supportive recently, not just because of the weight inside her and the aching back and all the rest.

And when it happens, it is just as everyone said: using trance and hypnotic time-distortion and breath control to hold back the tremendous impulse to push; and then in the second phase to do exactly that when the medic says: ‘Now, push now!’

Soon enough, it comes: the final yelling shove, and the sound she was dying to hear: a thin crying, the most beautiful sound in any universe, and those frequent yet never-to-be-forgotten words: