‘And life spread inward too, down into the guts of the worlds, following deep water flows, mineral seeps, leaks of heat energy, radioactivity … The interiors of worlds, too deep even for the immense bombardments of the young cosmos to do any damage, were warm, safe cradles in those early days, and life got down there pretty quickly – on Earth we found deep bugs all over the world, all of similar species. The deep rock is a static shelter, though, and relatively starved of energy. Life was slow to spread, even slow to procreate. To survive on such thin resources, living things learned to repair rather than to reproduce. But gradually a kind of complexity grew and spread, as the microbes gathered themselves into mutually supportive colonies, and the colonies combined into supercolonies.

‘A threshold was passed. Consciousness emerged.

‘On Earth, and on Per Ardua, most of the biomass of the planet – most of its weight of living stuff – dwells in the deep subsurface rocks. For most of their history humans never even suspected it existed. And it is aware, a constellation of huge, slow minds. These are the Dreamers. They remember their birth, when the universe was young.

‘And world after world woke up …’

The story was told in fragments, day by day, amid intense interrogation by Stef and the others.

As the weeks and months passed since their arrival at the antistellar point of Per Ardua – as the deaths of Ari and Inguill faded in the memory – the audience around Earthshine came and went. They all needed to sleep and eat; they all had chores to do with the maintenance of the colony that kept them all alive – and they were all determined to support Mardina through her pregnancy. That drew even the ColU away from Earthshine, and its slow, sometimes rambling monologue.

But they listened, and they questioned Earthshine on confusing details from their different viewpoints. Gradually a kind of summary of the story was emerging, one which they could all grasp, one way or another.

And in the midst of cosmic strangeness, human life went on.

As Mardina’s pregnancy approached its full term, she became ever heavier, ever more slow-moving. At least she felt she had good support, isolated as she was here. The ColU had been specifically instructed in childbirth procedure to support the growth of the original ISF colonies, and Earthshine’s fabricators were capable of synthesising any medicinal support she needed. She had at her side wise women in her own mother and Stef Kalinski. And Chu was turning out to be a doting parent-to-be. Only Clodia remained a problem for now, her residual jealousy over Chu getting in the way – and, perhaps, Mardina thought, Clodia’s resentment at having her own ambitions to be a soldier thwarted. It was a shame that the comradeship they’d built up on Yupanquisuyu was gone now – or maybe they’d just grown out of it, she thought.

No, Mardina couldn’t complain about the support she had, even if she would have preferred to have Michael the medicus on hand, or better yet a fully equipped Brikanti hospital.

Still, as time passed, she felt less and less enthusiastic about work. Even about moving around too much.

And, in a dome where there wasn’t a lot of entertainment, she found the slow processes of the fabricators’ labour an increasing distraction. One morning Mardina found one little gadget, no larger than a loaf of bread, sitting in a pool of ground-up Arduan rock dust, which in turn it was processing into machine parts that it gathered in neat heaps. She knelt to watch it, rapt.

Chu said, ‘It is proceeding faster than I imagined.’

‘This one’s actually making a copy of itself.’

‘I suppose it is giving birth, in a way. Bit by bit.’

Mardina, sitting on a heap of blankets, rubbed her belly. ‘I wish I could do it that way. Take out this little monster one limb at a time and then assemble it on the floor.’

‘You don’t mean that.’

‘No, I don’t suppose I do. But if these machines keep this up, we’ll start to become a real colony. Titus wants to call it “Nova Roma”.’

But Chu did not smile. ‘It is a shame that we will have so little time to enjoy what we build.’

Mardina flinched; it wasn’t the kind of thing Chu usually said. She looked down at the solidity of the rocky floor, and up at the star-strewn sky beyond the dome, and she reached for Chu’s hand. ‘We can’t think like that.’

‘No. I am sorry. For even if what the mechanical sage says is true, it is up to us to behave as if it is not so.’

She tried to absorb that. Then she stirred. ‘Come on. Help me up, I’m getting stiff. Time for my exercise, a couple of tours of the dome …’

‘From the beginning the great communities of Dreamers apprehended something of the universe around them.

‘They sensed the early battering of their worlds by the debris of planetary formation. They were tugged by the subtle tides exerted by their worlds’ parent stars and sister planets. They could feel the slow geological evolution of their host worlds – an evolution shaped from the beginning by life itself; there’s evidence that the presence of life on a planet like Earth, for instance, even helps stabilise the formation of continents.

‘Even multicellular life, when it evolved – infrequently, sporadically – served as a kind of sensory mechanism for the living worlds.

‘For some worlds, given the right conditions, with an atmosphere reasonably transparent to the parent star’s radiation, energy could pour down from the sky onto the land and into the upper layers of the oceans, and the familiar miracles of complex life could come about. Photosynthesis, a chemical means to exploit the energy of stellar radiation. Grand rebuildings of oceans and atmospheres through the injections of such gases as oxygen or methane. The evolution of secondary forms of life – like Earth’s animals – to feed off those products. But the outer layers of complex planetary life, so important to creatures like humans, were all but an irrelevance to the Dreamers. They only ever amounted to a trivial fraction of any world’s total biomass. And the complex creatures were usually not even aware of the noostrata that permeated the rocks beneath their feet.

‘Yet, through the frantic reactions of the complex forms, “animals” and “plants”, to external events like asteroid strikes or stellar flares or supernova explosions, the Dreamers came to know the universe in more detail.

‘I think even then, far back in cosmic time, the Dreamers began to get the first hints of the approach of the End Time.

‘And then there was communication, between Dreamer worlds.

‘The complex forms, in their haphazard way, built spacecraft, or infested comets and other wandering bodies, and began a new kind of contact, supplementing natural panspermia, the slow drift of impact-loosened rocks. Panspermia had always been a way for the worlds to be linked to each other. A package of living things and genetic data is a kind of communication, a message from one minded world to another. With the coming of complex life and interstellar travel that process remained random, without central direction, but did become more frequent.

‘From the beginning the living worlds had been aware of each other’s existence. Now, slowly, sporadically, imperfectly, they began to talk.

‘Imagine a community of minded worlds, then. All different in detail, yet all with fundamental similarities, engaged in a slow, chance conversation. They shared ideas, perceptions. Some grew in stature, while others became more inward-looking. They were all effectively immortal, of course – and they were stuck with each other. I imagine them as like a college of bickering professors, locked in decades-long rivalries. But in the case of the Dreamer worlds, aeons-long. Not quite immortal, though; in a dangerous universe, whole worlds can be lost, sometimes, and all their freight of life and mind with them.