“I dunno. Maybe we should leave him for the doc.”

“He’s fine. Aren’t you, Gerald, mate. Just knackered, that’s what.”

“Well, okay.” Jed leant over, and tired to tug Gerald up.

Several loud clanking sounds came from the airlock.

Gari ran in. “The bus is here,” she said breathlessly.

“It’ll take us to Marie,” Beth said encouragingly. “Come on, Gerald. You can do it.”

His legs twitched feebly.

Between them, they got him standing. With one on either side, and Gerald’s arms round their shoulders, they shuffled him towards the airlock.

Marie sat hunched up on the corridor floor outside the bridge. She hadn’t stopped crying since Kiera had been exorcised. The memories of what had happened since Lalonde were vivid, deliberately so. Kiera hadn’t cared about Marie knowing what was going on, what her body was doing.

It was disgusting. Filthy.

Even though it wasn’t her performing those acts, Marie knew she would never banish what her body had done. Kiera’s soul might have gone, but her haunting would never be over.

She’d been given her life back, and couldn’t see a single reason for living it.

The airlock cycled, and the hatch whirred open.

“Marie.”

It was a frail, pained croak, but it sliced right into her soul. “Daddy?” she moaned incredulously. When she looked up he was standing in the airlock, holding on to the rim. He looked dreadful, barely managing to stand. But his frail old face was suffused with all the joy of a father holding his infant child for the first time. She couldn’t begin to imagine what he’d gone through to be here at this time. And he’d suffered it all because she was his daughter, and that alone entitled her to his love forever.

She stood and held out both hands to him. Wanting a cuddle from Daddy. Wanting him to take her home where none of this would ever happen.

Gerald smiled wondrously at his pretty little daughter. “I love you, Marie.” His body gave way, pitching him face first onto the floor.

Marie screamed and ran forwards. His breath was juddering, eyes closed.

“Daddy! Daddy, no!” She pawed at him in hysterics.

“Daddy, talk to me!”

The steward from the bus was shouldering her aside, waving a medical block sensor along Gerald’s inert body. “Oh shit. Give me a hand,” he yelled at Jed. “We’ve got to get him into the habitat.”

Jed was staring at Marie, unable to move. “It’s you,” he said, enchanted.

Beth pushed past him and knelt beside the steward. A life support package had covered Gerald’s face, pumping air into his lungs.

“Medical emergency,” the steward datavised. “Get a crash team to the reception lounge.” The medical block datavised a violent alarm as Gerald’s heart stopped. He tore the wrapping from a paramedic package and slapped it across Gerald’s neck. Nanonic filaments invaded his throat, seeking out the major arteries and veins, pumping in artificial blood, keeping the brain alive.

Rather sheepishly, the participants from the Disco At The End Of The World were wandering across the concrete yard in a hungover stupor, watching dawn break over the arcology. It wasn’t something any of them had expected to see.

Andy was down there with them, datavising questor after questor into the segments of the net that were coming back on-line. Satellites were providing temporary coverage as the civil authorities began to re-establish some kind of control. Nothing he did could bring an acknowledgement from her neural nanonics. Every programming trick he knew was useless.

He started to walk towards the gate out onto the road. She was out there somewhere; if he had to search the whole arcology himself, he would find her.

“What’s that?” someone asked.

People were stopping and looking up at the dome. The sun had only just risen over the eastern rim; it showed a low bank of grey cloud washing in from the north. It reached the geodesic crystal structure and flowed gently round it. Not an armada storm; in fact Andy had never seen a cloud move so slowly before. Then it became curiously hard to see out through the crystal hexagons. The reason took a very long time to register, he even checked the now-fervid news shows to be absolutely certain.

For the first time in nearly five and a half centuries, snow was falling on London.

There was no sign now that humans had ever visited or been involved with the red dwarf star named Tunja. Joshua had moved the settled Dorado asteroids to the New Washington system along with all their industrial stations; the two Edenist habitats were to be found orbiting Jupiter. Nothing remained to tell the new inhabitants of the system’s infamous history.

Quantook-LOU had spent two days recovering from the effects of gravity he’d endured in Lalarin-MG. He remained immobile in his personal space, plugged into Anthi-CL’s dataweb, supervising the initial repair work. Conflicts between the diskcity dominions had ended, from surprise rather than agreement to start with. But he had mediated a new peace with the other distributors as they all examined and shared the images which came from sensors mounted on both sides of Tojolt-HI.

The bounty they revealed was almost beyond belief. Mastrit-PJ’s entire population of diskcities now orbited the tiny red star, packed together in equatorial orbit. And beyond them was a supply of raw cold matter that defied logic; a vast ring of particles over two hundred million kilometres in diameter. The Mosdva were suddenly drowning in resources.

They could leave the old worn-out diskcities, building new dominions independent from each other. As far as the distributors could tell, every Tyrathca enclave had been emptied at the same time the diskcities were taken from Mastrit-PJ. The conflicts which had cursed the Mosdva since the dominions were established would be over for all time.

Quantook-LOU also had the data from the humans, telling him how to build their faster-than-light ship engines. Other distributors were already mediating for favourable alliances with Anthi-CL, wanting to share the technology. This was a new part of space, strangely empty without the nebula which had dominated half of their old orbit. Billions of stars lay open to them. It would be interesting to find the humans again, and other races of which Joshua Calvert had spoken.

The Ly-cilph’s perception field expanded slowly outward as its active functions returned out of their dormancy within its macro-data lattice. At first it believed it had suffered memory loss. It was no longer in the jungle clearing where the human sacrifice was conducted, instead it appeared to be floating in clear space. The perception field could find nothing within range. No mass existed for a billion kilometres, not even a lone electron, which was extremely improbable. The energy waves washing through the field were of a strange composition, one it had no prior record of. An analysis of this continuum’s local quantum structure revealed it was no longer in the universe of its birth.

A dense mass point emerged beside it, emitting a variety of electromagnetic wave functions. It was impervious to the Ly-cilph’s probing.

“We understand you are on a voyage to comprehend the full nature of reality,” Tinkerbell said. “So are we. Would you like to join us?”

Oenone ’s crew appeared in Harkey’s Bar amid cheers and boisterous hugs, and the party looked like reaching truly epic proportions. Genevieve loved every minute of it. It was noisy, hot, and colourful; nothing like parties at Cricklade. People were nice to her, she’d managed to drink a couple of glasses of wine without Louise noticing, and cousin Gideon even partnered her on the dance floor. But nothing was funnier than watching the antics of Joshua’s brother, who spent the whole time trying to avoid a very beautiful and extremely determined blonde lady.