“I will never permit such a thing to be used. For all they are different, the souls are human. I am sworn to protect life throughout the Confederation.”

“The order to use it would not be yours to give. A weapon like that never falls within the prerogative of the military. It belongs to us, the politicians you despise.”

“Disapprove of. Occasionally.” The First Admiral permitted a slight smile to show.

“Keep on searching, Samual. Bully Gilmore and his people into finding a decent solution, a humanitarian one. I want that as much as you do. But they are to continue to develop the anti-memory in parallel.”

There was a pause. Samual knew that to refuse now would mean Haaker issuing an official request through his office. Which in turn would make his position as First Admiral untenable. That was the stark choice on offer.

“Of course, Mr President.”

President Haaker gave a tight smile, and datavised his processor to cancel the meeting, safe in the knowledge that their oh-so diplomatic clash would be known to no one.

The encryption techniques which provided a security-level-one conference were, after all, known to be unbreakable. The most common statistic quoted by security experts was that every AI in the Confederation running in parallel would be unable to crack the code in less than five times the life of the universe. It would, therefore, have proved quite distressing to the CNIS secure communications division (as well as their ESA and B7 equivalents, among others) to know that a perfect replica of a 27-inch 1980’s Sony Trinitron colour television was currently showing the image of the First Admiral and the Assembly President to an audience of fifteen attentive duomillenarians and one highly inattentive ten-year-old girl.

Tracy Dean sighed in frustration as the picture vanished to a tiny phosphor dot in the middle of the screen. “Well, that’s gone and put the cat amongst the pigeons, and no mistake.”

Jay was swinging her feet about while she sat on a too-high stool. As well as being their main social centre, the clubhouse catered for the retired Kiint observers who weren’t quite up to living by themselves in a chalet anymore. A huge airy building, with wide corridors and broad archways opening into sunlit rooms that all seemed to resemble hotel lounges. The walls were white plaster, with dark-red tile floors laid everywhere. Big clay pots growing tall palms were a favourite. Tiny birds with bright gold and scarlet bodies and turquoise membrane wings flittered in and out through the open windows, dodging the purple provider globes. The whole theme of the clubhouse was based around comfort. There were no stairs or steps, only ramps; chairs were deeply cushioned; even the food extruded by the universal providers, no matter what type, was soft, requiring little effort to chew.

The first five minutes walking through the building had been interesting. Tracy showed her round, introducing her to the other residents, all of whom were quite spry despite their frail appearance. Of course they were all very happy to see her, making a fuss, patting her head, winking fondly, telling her how nice her new dress was, suggesting strangely named biscuits, sweets and ice creams they thought she’d enjoy. They didn’t move much from their lounge chairs; contenting themselves with watching events around the Confederation and nostalgic programmes from centuries past.

Jay and Tracy wound up in the lounge with the big TV for half the afternoon, while the residents argued over what channel to watch. They flipped through real-time secret governmental and military conferences, alternating those with a show called “Happy Days,” which they all cackled along to in synchronisation with the brash laughter track. Even the original commercial breaks were showing. Jay smiled in confusion at the archaic unfunny characters, and kept sneaking glances out of the window. For the last three days she’d played on the beach with the games the universal providers had extruded; swam, gone for long walks along the sand and through the peaceful jungle behind the beach. The meals had easily been as good as the ones in Tranquillity. Tracy had even got her a processor block with an AV lens that was able to pick up Confederation entertainment shows, which she watched for a few hours every evening. And Richard Keaton had popped in a couple of times to see how she was getting on. But, basically, she was fed-up. Those planets hanging so invitingly in the sky above were a permanent temptation, a reminder that things in the Kiint home system were a bit more active than the human beach.

Tracy caught her wistful gaze once and patted her hand. “Cultural differences,” she said confidentially as the mortified Fonz received his army draft papers. “You have to understand the decade before you understand the humour.”

Jay nodded wisely, and wondered just when she’d be allowed to see Haile again. Haile was a lot more fun than the Fonz. Then they’d flicked stations to the First Admiral and the President.

“Corpus will have to intervene now,” one of the other residents said, a lady called Saska. “That anti-memory could seep outside the human spectrum. Then there’d be trouble.”

“Corpus won’t,” Tracy replied. “It never does. What is, is. Remember?”

“Check your references,” another woman said. “Plenty of races considered deploying similar weapons when they encountered the beyond. We’ve got records of eighteen being used.”

“That’s awful. What happened?”

“They didn’t work very well. Only a moderate percentage of the inverse transcendent population were eliminated. There’s too much pattern distortion among the inverses to conduct an anti-memory properly. No species has ever developed one that operates fast enough to be effective. Such things cannot be considered a final solution by any means.”

“Yes but that idiot Haaker won’t know that until after it’s been tried,” Galic, one of the men, complained. “We can’t possibly allow a human to die, not even an inverse. No human has ever died.”

“We’ve suffered a lot though,” a resentful voice muttered.

“And they’ll start dying on the removed worlds soon enough.”

“I tell you, Corpus won’t intervene.”

“We could appeal,” Tracy said. “At the very least we could ask for an insertion at the anti-memory project to monitor its development. After all, if anyone’s going to come up with an anti-memory fast enough to devastate the beyond, it’ll be our weapons-mad race.”

“All right,” Saska said. “But we’ll need a quorum before we can even get the appeal up to an executive level.”

“As if that’ll be a problem,” Galic said.

Tracy smiled mischievously. “And I know of someone who’s perfectly suited to this particular insertion.” Several groans were issued across the lounge.

“Him?”

“Far too smart for his own good, if you ask me.”

“No discipline.”

“We never ran observer operations like that.”

“Cocky little bugger.”

“Nonsense,” Tracy said briskly. She put her arm round Jay. “Jay likes him, don’t you, Jay?”

“Who?”

“Richard.”

“Oh.” Jay held up Prince Dell; for some unexplainable reason she hadn’t managed to abandon the bear in her room. “He gave me this,” she announced to the lounge at large.

Tracy laughed. “There you go then. Arnie, you prepare the appeal, you’re best acquainted with the minutiae of Corpus protocol procedures.”

“All right.” One of the men raised his hands in gruff submission. “I suppose I can spare the time.”

The TV was switched back on, playing the signature tune for “I Love Lucy.” Tracy pulled a face, and took Jay’s hand. “Come on, poppet, I think you’re quite bored enough already.”

“Who’s the Corpus?” Jay asked as they walked through the front entrance and into the sharp sunlight. There was a black iron penny-farthing bicycle mounted on a stone pedestal just outside. The first time Jay had seen it, she’d taken an age to work out how people were supposed to ride it.