Gyrol had organized a guard for those burying the dead because sleer activity had meanwhile increased tenfold. A great deal of wreckage had been cleared from the spot where a lander had crashed into the lower city, and those that required shelter had been housed in warehouses in the industrial district. Medical teams were working night and day to disinfect and sew shut the head wounds nearly every citizen bore. They would recover, regroup, and then… and then.

The Human Polity?

Tanaquil shook his head as if to dispel shadows. Everything was black: depression constricted his mind and sapped his strength, his will. The excitement that was now displacing shock in the likes of Stollar and Gyrol seemed utterly inaccessible to him. He would just do his job, keep going. There wasn’t anything else. Then a knock at his door broke his reverie.

‘Who is it?’ he asked.

‘Stollar and Gyrol,’ replied Stollar, some tension clear in his voice.

‘Come in.’

The two men entered, Stollar resting heavily on a cane, Gyrol still in his kilnsman gear and lugging one of the small telescopes and a tripod from Stollar’s tower.

Stollar looked around the dark room, focused on the shutters pulled across the windows and the closed balcony doors. He glanced meaningfully at Gyrol as he pointed at these.

‘What is it? I’ve got a lot to do,’ said Tanaquil.

‘You haven’t seen—no, obviously not. Perhaps we should step out onto your balcony,’ Stollar replied.

Tanaquil didn’t want them here, he wanted to be alone with his thoughts, but something in both of their expressions pulled him to his feet. Stollar moved over to the balcony doors, unlatched and pulled them open. Perhaps some new collapse in the lower city? Tanaquil dared not think otherwise. He stepped out into the dark after the old man, Gyrol following close behind and stepping to one side to set up the telescope. Tanaquil surveyed his city, seeing only the fires being fed by those horrible grey lice-things.

‘Look up, Chief Metallier,’ said Stollar.

Tanaquil did as instructed—a telescope was hardly required. Bright leviathans filled the sky, immense ships that would have dwarfed Ogygian. One vast ship, almost like a steel moon, hung clearly in view. Smaller ships were jetting in between. Other ships, smaller still but seeming large because they loomed so close, were coming down. Tanaquil gaped, felt the blackness around him dispersing under the impact of this vision, something breaking in his chest. He bowed his head and felt it coming, felt Stollar’s hand momentarily on his shoulder before he and Gyrol returned inside to give him space. He moved forwards and rested his hands on the rail as grief heaved out of him. He did not know how long this lasted. One of the ships, a thing consisting of four spheres mounted at the end of star arms, drifted over the city, its correction jet flames stabbing out. Tanaquil reached up and touched the tears pouring down his face, then wiped them away. The pain was still there—he doubted it would ever go away completely. He returned inside to where Stollar and Gyrol waited.

‘Our world is going to change drastically,’ he said, ‘but we will not allow that change to swamp us, to erase what we have done or what we are. We have work to do, so let’s begin.’

It was virtuality, illusion, for no projector could get close, and what point would there be in projecting holograms to that place anyway? But there was a point to this; Jack felt there was a point. Perhaps he was too much of an aesthete. Perhaps there was too much conceit in this, and just maybe Dragon owned that same conceit as much as himself and Aphran.

Whatever, Jack and the erstwhile Separatist walked on the surface of the brown dwarf. Dragon, who had rescued them just before they departed the Cull system but seemed reluctant to give them up to Jerusalem or any of the other Polity AIs patrolling this still-enclosed sector of space, seemed not to be present at all—granting them this illusory space and a definite moment of satisfaction.

‘He makes a pretty pattern,’ said Aphran, eyeing the silvery spirals and ellipses inlaid in the super-dense surface.

‘He does that. And it is a pattern that is changing.’

‘What?’ Aphran looked up.

Jack pointed. ‘Those ellipses are compressed Jain nodes. They won’t change, apparently, unless removed from this environment. They require a host and a motivating will. The rest is him still trying to survive, still trying to return himself to order.’

‘He’s alive? He thinks?’

‘In a sense, and slowly.’

‘Will he get away from here?’

Jack allowed himself a hangman’s smile. ‘Not in the lifetime of this universe.’

A golden egg clasped in one brass hand, Mr Crane walked the dusty plateaux, shady canyons and ragged mountain chains of Cull. Like a knight who slew a dragon, he slid from cold reality into bar yarn, and very quickly into legend. Those who saw that tall striding figure, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and with the bottom of his long ragged coat flapping about his lace-up boots, often agreed that a flying creature accompanied him—one much like some seen in the spaceport being built just outside Golgoth. Perhaps they thought this extra touch added veracity to their assertion that they had actually seen Mr Crane. Others pretended to believe these witnesses with the same patronizing kindness with which they believed those who claimed to have seen the Inconstant Sea.

What they had seen was real, sort of, in a sense…