‘Intact,’ said Rhianna. ‘I almost wish it wasn’t.’

Because at least something would have happened. Roger understood. The negative result could mean anything, even that Helsen and Ranulph had escaped offworld, though the mu-space quarantine should have prevented that.

‘So what’s the agenda today?’ asked Roger.

It was the fifth day of training, and he had passed through exhaustion to a kind of flow state, everything happening automatically because he was too fatigued for self-critical thought, too tired to get in his own way. Ancient samurai called this state mu-shin, the derivation identical to that of mu-space; and they strove to reach it always.

‘Metacognition,’ said Rhianna in local Spanalian, then repeated it in Aeternum.

Roger blinked at the semantic resonance of the Aeternal term.

‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’

‘In what way?’ asked Rhianna.

‘We can’t do it in realspace.’

‘Really? Trust me.’ She smiled. ‘I’ve done this before.’

All around, the quickglass chamber reconfigured into shapes that would have looked bizarrely angular to a normal observer, here spiky with fractal complexity, there distorted into visual paradoxes of impossible polygons, of straight edges that appeared to spiral, of static lattices that seemed to twist into and around themselves.

To a Pilot, it meant more: the shadow of a reflection, the hint of different geometry.

A soupçon of mu-space.

‘Now relax deeply.’ Her voice appeared to pulse and wash in tidal waves. ‘And deeper still …’

His awareness fell deep inside himself, though his eyes remained open, assisting the illusion that he was plunging into a different universe, the continuum where he and all his kind came wonderfully alive. But now it was more than that.

Roger split apart.

The mind that had been Roger Blackstone became a scale-free forest of neural cliques and groups, miniature gestalten with their own brand of self-awareness: a community, a population of cognitive daemons aware of and communicating with each other. Those groups, freed of the old patterns, began to explore new ways of joining together, of running in parallel, trying new architecture as suggested by the decoded linguistic input – he/they/all of him were aware of the processing in his language centres, the auditory computation, the words originating from the other being whose designation was Rhianna Chiang, signposting this process of change but not controlling it, because that task was his/theirs/all components’ responsibility – and some self-aware cliques combined to form a fleeting thought: Was this how the Anomaly experienced itself?

Change continued.

By the timeflow of realspace thermodynamics in the location that his body occupied, some three standard hours passed while this process of metacomputational reorganization continued in Roger’s central nervous system. But no one, not even a Pilot, could remain in this state for ever. Not in this universe. So he began, under Rhianna’s measured direction, to come out of it.

Rebuilding his mind, piece by piece, as he did so.

Talk about multi-tasking.

He understood, as he reintegrated, how different things would be in future – and how wildly marvellous they would be in mu-space, back where he belonged. Summoning a Labyrinthine fastpath no longer seemed impossible, rather a trivial application of inductive projection, of the neural and quasi-neural flows that all Pilots were capable of, no matter where they had been raised.

How incredible the world is.

Every pore of Rhianna’s facial skin, every tiny feature of the quickglass surroundings, glowed with an inner light it had always possessed. Every sound – all the vibration that washed over and through his skin during every second he was alive – became rich and crisp and wonderfully complex. Rhianna’s pride in his change was obvious from the airborne molecules that every human being could atavistically sense, but not bring into conscious awareness the way he could now.

Metaconsciousness was his.

Who could have believed it might be like this?

He was a multitude of shifting personalities – as he had always been, as everyone was – with a new qualitative awareness, and the ability to be many people at once: the observer scanning the surroundings constantly for danger; the mathematician and the artist appreciating the world and the ideal forms beyond; the caring, empathising lover of all people, who understood everyone and forgave them their weaknesses; and the binding personality, the one who emerged and might in emergency control the others: the new core Roger, if there was such a thing.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Rhianna.

She sensed it, and he knew that: the feedback between them was a pulsing bidirectional blizzard of non-verbal signals, from pheromones to micromuscle twitches.

‘I’m not,’ he said.

Because there was only one word that suited his coordinating self, a single name that matched perfectly: an old word that resonated down the centuries from its roots among the followers of Thórr and Óthinn.

Wolf.

He smiled, a rictus appropriately lupine.

‘That’s right,’ he told Rhianna. ‘You understand.’

She turned away, broadcasting regret.

But it’s all right.

He had become the Wolf.

SIXTY-TWO

EARTH, 778 AD

Shingle crunched beneath Ulfr’s feet. Ahead on the shore rose the rotting hulk of a sea-monster, of the kind known as whale. Much meat had been hacked from it. Farther along, around a bonfire upon the beach, men, women and children were feasting. Out on the waves, a sea-going longship was at anchor with sail furled. Only a few men were aboard, as far as Ulfr could see.

Kolr followed, his reins in Ulfr’s left hand. Brandr, most faithful of war-hounds, trotted at Ulfr’s side. They were all he needed. Chief Folkvar and the village were far behind him now.

Ulfr had thought he was setting out to hunt, but that had been many days ago, and he still did not know what manner of prey he was after. There had been rabbits but no deer; nuts and berries but no fruit. The journey had lasted long enough for the two wolf hides to cure: wind-dried and rubbed with bitter earth as the women used back home. The preserved hides were tied in a roll at the back of Kolr’s saddle.

‘Ho, stranger.’ It was a woman, clad in scarlet wool, her apron blue as her eyes. ‘You are welcome to join us.’

‘I will, and thank you.’

He hobbled Kolr and strode on with Brandr.

‘Where are you from?’ asked a bearded man, handing over a chunk of well-cooked whale meat.

‘I am Ulfr Ulfrsson, and I hail from Dark Lake, where Folkvar Grímsson is chief.’

‘Then we are more than well met, for I am named Grímr, though I am not your chief’s father. As far as I know, that is. But a man’s seed spreads far.’

‘Not unless you sired a child,’ said Ulfr, ‘when you were two years old. Is everyone here so manly?’

There were roars of laughter, redoubled when the woman in red said: ‘I’m not.’

‘I still wouldn’t argue with you, Ása,’ said Grímr.

She was beautiful, and there was something in the way she looked at Ulfr; but the crackling of the bonfire reminded him of a funeral pyre, the burning of Eira’s shrouded remains. He continued to eat, splitting his food with Brandr, but only because he knew he should replenish his body at every chance. Enjoyment had dissipated, like rising smoke.

Still he talked, because courtesy demanded it. Some of the group were from the ship’s crew; all were from the same settlement, a considerable walk north. They had used the longship, rowing hard when the wind was against them, to force the whale to beach, frightening it with war-yells and clashing weapons, being careful not to lose the oars.

‘It was well done,’ Ulfr told them.