‘What… where are you going?’ the war drone asked.

Its radio signals would take centuries to be picked up in the Polity. But what if something came out this way, searching? King selected a fuser missile in its carousel, and when sufficiently far out, fired it. The bright silent flare reduced the war drone to a splash of metal across the rock surface. The King of Hearts turned, set its course, dropped into U-space.

‘So you survived Hiroshima, old man, and have lived for five centuries?’

Horace Blegg gasped in cold air, blew it out in a misty cloud — the frigidity of his surroundings as sharp as the recent replays of his memory. The glassy and whorled plain extended to infinite distance below a light jade-green sky. Perhaps this was supposed to represent the inside of the disc.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘Atheter,’ came the reply. ‘In your terms.’

To warm himself up, Blegg began walking, his envirosuit boots soft on the hard surface. A tension grew across his skull, and something tugged and worried inside his mind and memory. It almost felt to him as if his memories were being stacked like cards, shuffled, and sometimes dealt. Four distinct instances in his life had already been replayed. Two at Hiroshima, one at Nuremberg, and one at Berkeley: strong formative episodes.

‘You survived Hiroshima and have since been present during many major events in human history.’

Blegg halted. A playing card, the size of a door, rose out of the glassy ground ahead. It depicted two towerblocks etched against a blue sky. His own image, the cards, reflected back at him. He saw the planes fly in, the subsequent explosions and fire. He remembered standing on the Brooklyn Bridge, watching the horror and not remembering where he had been before that. A young man who minutes before had been jogging along the sidewalk, German by his accent, said, ‘One plane could be an accident but…’

A woman just struggled to heave her bulk from her car. ‘Oh my God, what do you mean? Oh my God.’

‘Two planes.’ The German shrugged, and chose to add nothing further.

They watched there for hours: the endless billowing of smoke, small distant objects falling fast.

‘No… oh no.’

Oh yes.

Road-accident fascination, the world turned slightly out of kilter. The final collapse of each tower. Blegg turned away from that memory as another card slid up into view. Here Spaceship One, white, insectile, and beautiful, setting out to take the X prize: the forerunner of full commercial exploitation of space. There, Unity Mining rescue craft evacuating the International Moonbase: a most graphic demonstration of the fall of Nations and the rise of Corporations. Then another card…

Blegg stood before the wide chainglass windows—that miraculous new substance—and saw the Needle poised in blackness, its three balanced U-space engine nacelles gleaming in reflected light from the distant sun; a dagger of a ship stabbed through the ring of a carrier shell. He listened to the commentary over the Amaranth Station’s comsystem, then the countdown. The ion engines ignited on the outer shell, speeding the ship out of sight. He turned to the big screens showing views from the watch stations strung out from Mars into deep space. The shell separated, as per plan, and the Needle’s fusion drive ignited. Fast, one screen to another. Zero, the Needle dropped out of existence in a flash of spontaneously generated photons. It certainly dropped into that continuum called U-space, but it never came out again. Then, a slow slide to Amaranth Station twenty years down the line, neutron-blast scoured during one of the many corporate wars. Under new ownership now, the station was again his platform, this time to observe the first of many colony ships fleeing the solar system, before the corporate wars ground to a halt as the Quiet War reached its inevitable conclusion, with the AIs taking over.

‘There was not much resistance,’ Atheter observed.

‘Sporadic,’ Blegg replied. ‘Mostly crushed by human fighters bright enough to realize the AI rulers were better than any previous human ones.’

He turned to another card, saw how they were laid out all around him like gravestones.

Skaidon, direct interfacing with the Craystein computer; dead and sainted while opening a whole new vista in physics. The first runcible test between Earth and Mars. That pioneer building going up on the shores of Lake Geneva. Blegg walking inside, into a place where it should have been impossible for any human to come, revealing himself to the entity called Earth Central, ruler of the solar system, ruler then of the near stars as the first runcible seed ships arrived, then of that fast expanding empire called the Polity.

Now a huge ship formed in his view in the shape of a flattened pear, brassy in colour and bristling with antennae, weapons, spherical war drones pouring out of it like wasps from a nest recently whipped with a stick. A Polity dreadnought revolving slowly in space. Once spherical, now fires burnt deep inside it, revealing massive impact sites.

‘Prador,’ said Atheter.

‘Hostile from the first moment of contact. Without the AIs on our side, they would have crushed us. Their metals technology was way in advance of ours and their ships difficult to destroy—exotic-metal armour. But they did not have runcibles, for artificial minds are needed to control them. That gave us easy access to resources, the instantaneous repositioning of planetary forces. The card then showed some vast construct in space: a great claw, nil-G scaffolds groping out into blackness, ships and construction robots amassing all around.

‘We never needed that,’ Blegg said nodding at the huge object. ‘It was one of a planned network of space-based runcibles for shifting large ships, even fleets, or for hurling moons at the Prador. They withdrew before then. We never realized until afterwards that their old king had been usurped. The Second Kingdom became the Third Kingdom, and the new ruler knew this was a fight he could not win.’

‘You are a cipher for your time.’

‘I guess,’ said Blegg. ‘But we are all ciphers for our times. It is just that my time has been a long one. You perhaps are the ultimate cipher, for the time of an entire race?’

The cards began sinking out of sight. The scape around him revolved like some great cog repositioning reality.

You and me both, Alice, thought Blegg, closing his eyes until the nauseating sensation stopped.

‘And now Jain technology.’

Blegg opened his eyes. He stood now on a trampled layer of reedlike plants. Beside him those plants still grew tall, greenish red, small flowers of white and red blooming from a matted tangle of sideshoots. In the aubergine sky hung the orb of a distant gas giant: green and red and gold. In a moment he realized something mountainous now squatted beside him. He turned and looked up at it.

‘No,’ he murmured, ‘I don’t believe you.’

Something chuckled, low and deep.

Using the disassembler, Orlandine removed a silica crystal no larger than a grain of talc. Holding this between hundred-angstrom filaments, she conveyed it to a hollow memcrystal inside the disassembler head. Such memcrystals were designed for analysis of quantum computers used to control human nanotechnology, so perhaps this might be enough. Through nanotubes penetrating the memcrystal, she injected polarized carbon molecules into the hollow, where they underwent Van der Waals bonding. Slowly and surely, connections began to be made. Having already ascertained the connection points on the silica crystal to the sensory structures on the node’s surface, she became able to apply some logic to what she now received. The base code was quaternary, much like the earlier codes used in human quantum computing before they went multilevel synaptic, and was therefore disappointingly simple. Orlandine soon began to track the algorithms: this happens, check this, reach thus, check that, and so on. But a frightening, fascinating picture emerged.