‘And the Arabs are the best astronomers.’

‘They are. Yuri Eden, I hope you will have the chance to see their observation blisters. There is an atmosphere of calm – of learning, of reverence. They are like college study rooms, or religious sanctuaries. Indeed one of them is dedicated as a mosque.

‘In space, Moslems were always drawn to astronomy because of the need to find reliably the position of Earth, and therefore Mecca, for the purposes of daily prayers. But the Arabs have gone much further. They have fine optical telescopes, but also spectroscopes to analyse the light – though they have no image capture more advanced than wet-chemistry photography. And they have made a suite of discoveries, of more or less relevance to the mission of the Malleus Jesu. Of course a kernel ship under heavy acceleration, like this one, is a rather noisy platform. And they have to compensate for relativistic distortion, so close do we travel to the speed of light. They have developed sophisticated rule-of-thumb mathematics to achieve this, without, again, having the underlying theory …

‘Yuri Eden, the Arabs allowed me to peruse their libraries. They have painstakingly compiled good maps of the cosmic background radiation, the relic glow of the Big Bang – not that they have the cosmological theories to describe it that way.

‘And they seek out life-bearing planets, among the stars we pass. Targets for future missions like this one. Living worlds have certain characteristics. On Earth, for instance, the atmosphere holds oxygen and methane, reactive gases that if left to themselves would combine with other substances – iron ore in the rocks would rust – and be lost to the air. But it is the action of life that replenishes those reservoirs. Another kind of biosphere would produce other kinds of traces. Sometimes you can tell there’s life simply from colour changes, visible from space. Early Earth was probably predominantly purple, on the sea coasts anyhow …’

‘All this you found in their libraries? With Chu Yuen as your search engine. Ha! I imagine poor Chu getting pretty tired turning pages—’

‘Usually it’s unravelling scrolls. But, yes, it can be like that … One striking observation, Yuri Eden, is that many worlds the Arabs have observed are not living, but dead: once life-bearing, but evidently killed off, at least at the surface. And in some cases recently. You can tell this from remote observations. If all life on Earth were ended suddenly, the decomposition of a glut of corpses would dump ethane into the air, in great quantities. Without the water cycle mediated by the plants, there would be a rapid heating spike. And so on. All this can be observed from afar. Yuri Eden, the Arabs have made many such discoveries.’

‘What could kill off whole worlds? War?’

‘Perhaps, Yuri Eden.’

‘And with who knows what history-tweaking strangeness to follow? If our experience is any precedent.’

‘One can only speculate. Of course the Arabs also search for kernels. Worlds laden with them, targets for future Hatch-building expeditions. Again there are certain characteristic radiation signatures you can spot from afar. They have even begun to map the distribution of kernel-bearing worlds, and Hatches, across this part of the galaxy. Their maps are difficult to decipher, in fact: not maps as we know them but more itineraries, lists of distances and directions between locations … It appears that there is a kind of network. A certain percentage of kernel worlds are concentrated towards the centre of the galaxy. As if whatever initiated this process originated deeper in the galaxy, and the network of Hatch-building has been spreading to the outer reaches ever since.’

‘Hm. What’s different about the centre of the galaxy?’

‘It is older, in a sense. The galaxy is like a vast factory for manufacturing stars from interstellar dust and gas. Star-making started close to the centre, and is spreading out to the periphery. It is thought that towards the centre there may be habitable worlds born a billion years before the Earth.’

‘So the Hatches may have been started off by some ancient intelligence, lurking on one of these old, old worlds …’

‘The Arabs’ observations would fit that, Yuri Eden.’

‘But what’s it all for? Do you ever get the feeling we’re missing the big picture here, ColU? All the strangeness – the kernels, the Hatches, the dumping of whole histories … Maybe this is my South American drugs talking.’

‘Mostly we are too busy trying to survive to think too deeply about such matters, Yuri Eden.’

‘And also too busy riding these various gift horses to look them too closely in the mouth. The kernels are just too damn useful … But we do ask such questions – or at least you do, ColU.’

‘I try. My mission has always been to nurture the humanity around me – to nurture you and your family, Yuri Eden. By doing that I must consider the wider questions of which you speak. I must consider the future. And some of what I have learned about the future disturbs me.’

‘Maybe the drugs are hitting me again. Or else they’re wearing off. Run that by me again. The future?’

‘I have seen it in the sky, Yuri Eden. I told you that the Arab astronomers have carefully observed the background radiation from the Big Bang. That radiation, and distortions in it – ripples, non-homogeneities, polarisation – carries a great deal of information about the wider structure of the universe. After all, it has permeated the whole cosmos from the beginning. For instance, our cosmologists looked for evidence of other universes than our own. An interaction of two universes, a collision in some higher dimension, might leave echoes in the background, tremendous circles in the sky. But I, studying the Arab records with a depth of understanding that they cannot share, have seen … something else.’

‘What? The suspense is killing me, and I’m already dying.’

‘I apologise, Yuri Eden. I believe I have seen evidence of superluminal events. Faster-than-light phenomena.’

‘What the hell are you talking about now? Warp drive? Some kind of super-starship? A higher civilisation?’

‘Not that. Not on that scale. Much bigger. Please listen, Yuri Eden. In relativity theory, you know that nothing can travel through spacetime faster than light. That was Einstein’s most fundamental discovery. Even a transition through a Hatch, say from Mercury to Per Ardua, by whatever unknown mechanism enables such transitions, is marginally slower than lightspeed. But there is a get-out clause in the physics.’

‘Go on.’

‘Nothing can travel through spacetime faster than light. But spacetime is a substance, of a kind; it has structure. It can be distorted … Yuri Eden, waves can propagate in spacetime itself. And they can travel faster than light. The theoreticians have wondered if such warps could be used to carry ships at superluminal speeds.’

‘Beating light by surfing spacetime waves …’

‘That’s the idea, Yuri Eden. We never achieved a warp drive. But warp waves, as described by the theory, would emit certain kinds of exotic radiations. Even if we could never create them, we thought we could detect them.

‘Yuri Eden, I think I have seen the traces of warp ripples in the cosmic background radiation. Not small, contained signals, as you would associate with a starship. These are relics of events on a tremendous scale. By which I mean billions of light years wide, events spanning the universe.’

‘Larger than galaxies—’

‘Larger than superclusters of galaxies.’

‘Nurse! I think my drip’s come loose.’

‘I apologise, Yuri Eden. I will discuss all this with Colonel Kalinski; perhaps she will be able to make it clearer. But, you see, I am struggling to grasp the hypothesis I am formulating.’

‘What hypothesis?’

‘Imagine that in the future there is a – cataclysm. A tremendously violent event of some kind, spanning space – spanning the entire universe. This event is so energetic that among its effects are ripples in spacetime, tremendous waves—’