When he appealed silently to the President, he met a blank face. Very calmly, he said: “I do not know.”

There was a subliminal suggestion of a mass sigh from the tiers, maybe even resentment.

But I did what was right, I answered her on her own terms.

“I express gratitude that you speak the truth,” Rittagu-FHU said. “Now I do what is my task in this place, and speak for my race. The Tyrathca this day end our contact with all humans. We will leave your worlds. Do not come to ours.”

Rittagu-FHU stretched out a long arm, and a nine-fingered circular hand switched off her translator block. She hooted to her mate, and together they made their way to the exit.

The vast chamber was utterly silent as the door slid shut behind them.

Olton Haaker cleared his throat, squared his shoulders, and faced the Kiint ambassador who was standing passively in the bottom tier. “If you wish to leave us, Ambassador Roulor, then of course we shall provide every assistance in returning you and the other Kiint ambassadors to your homeworld. This is a human problem after all, we do not wish to jeopardize our fruitful relationship by endangering you.”

One of the snow-white Kiint’s tractamorphic arms uncurled to hold up a small processor block, its AV projection pillar produced a moiré sparkle. “Being alive is a substantial risk, Mr President,” Roulor said. “Danger always balances enjoyment. To find one, you must face and know the other. And you are wrong in saying that it is a human problem. All sentient races eventually discover the truth of death.”

“You mean you knew?” Olton Haaker asked, his diplomatic demeanour badly broken.

“We are aware of our nature, yes. We confronted it once, a great time ago, and we survived. Now you must do the same. We cannot help you in this struggle which you are facing, but we do sympathise.”

•   •   •

Starflight traffic to Valisk was dropping off; ten per cent in two days. Even though Rubra’s subsidiary thought routines managed the habitat’s traffic control, the statistic hadn’t registered with his principal personality. It was the economics of the shortfall which finally alerted him. The flights were all scheduled charters, bringing components to the industrial stations of his precious Magellanic Itg company. None of them were blackhawk flights from his own fleet, it was only Adamist ships.

Curious, he reviewed all the news fleks delivered by those starships which had arrived recently, searching for a reason, some crisis or emergency in another section of the Confederation. He drew a blank.

It was only when his principal personality routine made its weekly routine check on Fairuza that Rubra realized something was wrong inside the habitat as well. Fairuza was another of his protégés, a ninth-generation descendant who had showed promise from an early age.

Promise, as defined by Rubra, consisted principally of the urge to exert himself as leader of the other boys at the day club, snatching the biggest share, be it of sweets or game processor time, a certain cruel streak with regards to pets, contempt for his timid, loving parents. It marked him down as a greedy, short-tempered, bullying, disobedient, generally nasty little boy. Rubra was delighted.

When Fairuza reached ten years of age, the slow waves of encouragement began to twist their way into his psyche. Dark yearnings to go further, a feeling of righteousness, a sense of destiny, a quite insufferable ego. It was all due to Rubra’s silent desires oozing continually into his skull.

The whole moulding process had gone wrong so often in the past. Valisk was littered with the neurotic detritus of Rubra’s earlier attempts to create a dynamic ruthless personality in what he considered his own image. He wanted so much to forge such a creature, someone worthy to command Magellanic Itg. And for two hundred years he had endured the humiliation of his own flesh and blood failing him time and again.

But Fairuza had a resilient quality which was rare among his diverse family members. So far he had displayed few of the psychological weaknesses which ruined all the others. Rubra had hopes for him, almost as many hopes as he once had for Dariat.

However, when Rubra summoned the sub-routine which monitored the fourteen-year-old youth, nothing happened. A giant ripple of surprise ran down the entire length of the habitat’s neural strata. Servitor animals flinched and juddered as it passed below them. Thick muscle rings regulating the flow of fluids inside the huge network of nutrient capillaries and water channels buried deep in the polyp shell spasmed, creating surges and swirls which took the autonomic routines over half an hour to calm and return to normal. All eight thousand of Rubra’s descendants shivered uncontrollably, and for no reason they could understand, even the children who had no knowledge of their true nature yet.

For a moment, Rubra didn’t know what to do. His personality was distributed evenly through the habitat’s neural strata, a condition the original designers of Eden had called a homogenized presence. Every routine and sub-routine and autonomic routine was at once whole and separate. All perceptual information received by any sensitive cell was immediately disseminated for storage uniformly along the strata. Failure, any failure, was inconceivable.

Failure meant his own thoughts were malfunctioning. His mind, the one true aspect of self left to him, was flawed.

After surprise, inevitably, came fear. There could be few reasons for such a disaster. He might finally be succumbing to high-level psychological disorders. It was a condition the Edenists always predicted he would develop after enduring centuries of loneliness coupled with frustration at his inability to find a worthy heir.

He began to design a series of entirely new routines which would analyse his own mental architecture. Like undercover wraiths, these visitants flashed silently through the neural strata on their missions to spy on the performance of each sub-routine without it being aware, reporting back on his own performance.

A list of flaws began to emerge. They made a strange compilation. Some sub-routines, like Fairuza’s monitor, were missing completely, others were inactive, then there were instances of memory dissemination being blocked. The lack of any logical pattern bothered him. Rubra didn’t doubt that he was under attack, but it was a most peculiar method of assault. However, one aspect of the attack was perfectly clear: whoever was behind the disruptions had a perfect understanding of both affinity and a habitat’s thought routines. He couldn’t believe it was the Edenists, not them with their repugnant superiority. They considered time to be their premier weapon against him; the Kohistan Consensus was of the opinion that he could not sustain himself for more than a few centuries. And a covert undeclared war on someone who didn’t threaten them was an inconceivable breach of their culture’s ethics. No, it had to be someone else. Someone more intimate.

Rubra reviewed the monitor sub-routines which had been rendered inactive. There were seven; six of them were assigned to ordinary descendants, all of them under twenty; as they weren’t yet involved with Magellanic Itg they didn’t require anything more than basic observation to keep an eye on them. But the seventh . . . Rubra hadn’t bothered to examine him at any time during the last fifteen years of their thirty-year estrangement, his greatest ever failure: Dariat.

The intimation was profoundly shocking: that somehow Dariat had achieved a degree of control over the habitat routines. But then Dariat had managed to block all Rubra’s attempts to gain access to his mind through affinity ever since that fateful day thirty years ago. Dariat, for all his massive imperfections, was unique.