“Where’s Damon?” I asked, a little more harshly than I intended.

When she didn’t reply I amplified the request. “Damon Hart. Biological son of Conrad Helier, reared by his father’s accomplices in crime. Late recruit to the Hardinist Cabal, breaking his surviving foster mother’s rebellious heart. Don’t tell me he’s not in your records, alive or dead.”

“He’s dead,” said Davida Berenike Columella, after pausing to consult her inner resources. “Everyone who was alive in your time is dead, except for a handful of individuals preserved, as you have been, in Suspended Animation. According to the available data, Damon Hart is not one of those. We can’t be absolutely sure, because there are other repositories, but all the customary evidence of death is in place.”

That was what they had said about Conrad Helier. Even Damon had believed it, until he learned better. I knew how easily “all the customary evidence of death” could be faked, even in the twenty-second century, because it was a business I’d dabbled in more than once — but that wasn’t the issue my distraught mind seized upon.

“ Everyone?” I echoed. “What about the escalator to emortality? We all thought that the lucky ones, at least, would get to live forever.”

“The technologies of longevity available in your time were inadequate,” she informed me, flatly. “Nanotechnological repair and somatic rejuvenation had inbuilt limitations. The first true technologies of emortality didn’t come into use until the twenty-fifth century. They required the extensive genetic engineering of fertilized egg cells, so the first emortal human species had to be born to that condition. The oldest currently living individuals who have been continuously active were born in the two thousand four hundred and eighties.”

“When did Damon die?” I asked, not bothering to add the word “allegedly.”

She obviously had a covert data feed whispering incessantly into her inner ear. “In the year two thousand five hundred and two,” was the prompt answer.

Three hundred years! He’d left me where I was for three hundred yearsof his own protracted lifetime. Why hadn’t he used his authority and influence to get me out? What on Earth had I done to deserve that kind of neglect?

“All I ever did was hack into a few data stores,” I said, my voice no more than a whisper. “Steal a little information here, delete a little there, reconstruct a little here andthere. I was working for the government, for God’s sake. The realgovernment, not the elected one. I really am innocent, by any reasonable standard. I never killed anyone, or even hurt anyone much who wasn’t asking for it.”

“Can you be certain of that?” my interlocutor asked, still probing.

“Yes,” I said. “I amcertain. I’ve lost a few memories. I can’t remember August twenty-two zero-two, let alone September. In June and July I was working for Damon, withDamon. Not just working — playing too. Having a good time. Planning a little espionage. Nothing heavy, just run-of-the-mill low-level skulduggery. We weren’t even outlaws by then. We were on the inside, rubbing shoulders with the elite, playing in the big boys’ game, by their rules. I never killed anybody. I would remember. I remember what I did, what I was. Even if they’d added in every last one of all the things I could have been charged with in my youth but never was — all the burglary, the smuggling, the dealing, the tax evasion, the so-called pornography, and all the rest of that penny-ante crap — they couldn’t have put me away for more than twenty years. Why on Earth would they throw away the fucking key?”

Davida Berenike Columella didn’t know the answer. Either she figured that I needed a little time to come to terms with it or she was avidly watching for signs of mental breakdown, because she kept quiet, letting me run with the train of thought.

I realized that there was a certain contradiction in what I’d said. Damon and I hadbeen playing the big boys’ game, by their rules. We’d been playing in a pool where “a little espionage” and “low-level skulduggery” were no longer a matter for slapped wrists. We’d been playing in a pool where people took their secrets seriously.

Even so, a thousand years was an extremely long time to be hidden away. Why hadn’t Damon been able to find me? Why hadn’t he been able to get me out?

Suddenly, the stars outside the fake window didn’t seem so bright or so lordly. They seemed confused, lost in a darkness that they couldn’t quite obliterate even though they were massed in their trillions.

I knew that they weren’t all stars. Some of them were galaxies. The universe was full of galaxies, a hundred billion or more, but it was also full of darkness and emptiness.

Raw space, so the theorists of my time had said, was full of seething potentials — particulate eddies beyond the surface of the void, ever-ready to erupt into tangibility — but the sum of all that infinite activity was nothing.

And wherever the potential wasmanifest — wherever there was something instead of nothing — there was still, if measured on any scale responsible to the true size of the universe, almostnothing.

I existed. At least, I had to suppose so. But so what?

I felt that I had an obligation to pull myself together. After all, I seemed to be the first ambassador from the world of mortal men ever to be entertained in Excelsior.

“Why ninety-nine?” I asked, as calmly as I could. “Why did you start the calendar over?”

“The Christian Era had ended long before that system of counting was abandoned,” she said. “On Earth, the new calendar was belatedly introduced after the Great North American Basalt Flow — year one was the first year of the so-called Gaean Restoration. The microworlds in Earth orbit adopted the convention because we all share the same year. Different systems apply on the inner worlds and the outer satellites, and in the more distant microworld clusters.”

I saw a chance to rack up a few more marks in the big test by guessing what the “Great North American Basalt Flow” must have been.

“So the Yellowstone Supervolcano finally blew up again,” I said. “Every umpteen million years, regular as clockwork.” It would have been even more impressive if I’d been able to remember the exact term of its periodicity.

“The magma chamber that ruptured was located in the former Yellowstone National Park in the United States of North America,” she confirmed, after a brief fact-check pause. “It had been closely monitored ever since the Coral Sea disaster of 2542, and was thought to be under control. The recriminations and accusations are still unsettled, at least on Earth itself.”

That was an intriguing remark. “You mean somebody let it off deliberately?” I asked. “Somebody blew up North America and plunged the whole planet into nuclear winter?”

That required a slightly longer data feed, perhaps to translate the term “nuclear winter.” Eventually, she said: “The majority opinion is that the eruption was an accident caused by a malfunction of the systems securing the magma chamber. There are, however, factions which believe that the systems were sabotaged — they differ in their hypotheses as to who might have been responsible and why.”

I didn’t need a data feed to interpret “Gaean Restoration” for me. A major basalt flow must have begun with an explosive release of gas and ash into the air, fouling the atmosphere for years. The ecosphere must have suffered a tremendous die-back — but when the dust had settled and the poison gases had been neutralized, the human survivors must have set about the business of regenerating the ecosphere according to their own schemes. This time, unlike any other in the deep prehistory of the Earth, there must have been human survivors, but millions or billions must have died. Millions or billions of emortals.