‘Let me get this straight,’ she said. ‘You want me to fly my little intership craft right into that mess — and to the very centre, about two and a half thousand miles in?’

‘Yes.’

Mika glanced across at the flapping skatelike guide that had led her out from the interior of Dragon, and it returned her gaze steadily with its blue palp eyes. She then thought about dracomen, those entities Dragon created with the same ease that a human would fashion a clay doll. ‘Why don’t you send a probe?’

‘But I am sending a probe,’ Dragon replied. ‘You.’

‘It’s very dangerous out there. I’ve already witnessed that.’

‘It is not so dangerous out there now.’

‘You still haven’t told me why you aren’t sending your own organic probe,’ Mika insisted. ‘If you don’t tell me why, I won’t go-’

Of course she knew Dragon wanted her to go because of the new memories sitting like lumps of rock in her skull, but she wanted certainties.

‘Very well,’ said Dragon, almost resignedly. ‘Because you are an evolved creature. You are not a product of Jain technology, in fact you are not a product of any technology.’

‘That’s as clear as mud.’

‘Perhaps you have not vocalized it yet, Mika,’ said Dragon, ‘but you know what is in there.’

Gazing at that tangled forest of Jain substructure, she surmised that here it formed only a thin surface over something else. ‘I feel something… but I don’t really understand.’ Mika turned her attention to the blue palp eyes still staring at her. ‘Can’t you for once explain clearly?’ However, even as she made this request, she stood up, checked the integrity of her spacesuit and turned towards the airlock.

‘Long ago when all four of my spheres still existed and I myself was sited on the planet Aster Colora, I summoned a Polity ambassador to me. I was still struggling with my Maker programming then, and trying every method I could manage to circumvent it — hence my history of Delphic and obscure pronouncements.’

Reaching the airlock, Mika glanced round to see the remote flopping along the floor behind her. ‘Is this story going anywhere?’ she enquired.

‘The ambassador sent was Ian Cormac,’ said Dragon. ‘He solved the problem I set him in his usual inimitable manner, with cold logic and with a CTD concealed in his rucksack. He would not be suitable for this purpose.’

‘What purpose?’

‘Being demonstrably human.’

With her helmet and visor closed up Mika stepped through the shimmer-shield towards the outer door. The remote flopped after her.

‘You’re saying Cormac isn’t demonstrably human?’

‘The matter is open for debate.’

Mika grimaced. She did not want to be distracted from the main thrust of her enquiry.

‘Still too much mud,’ she said.

‘It is your turn to be the ambassador, but this time neither concealed threats nor a propensity for solving puzzles will help,’ said Dragon. ‘Your own experiences were perfect for convincing my twin sphere that the evidence I presented regarding the death of the Maker civilization had not been fabricated. Those memories, along with further evidence of the same events and evidence of what happened to the Atheter, all reside inside your head alone. You are also the best human that I know and are therefore the right example of humanity for the task of presenting… humanity.’

‘Meaning we’re the next civilization in danger of being destroyed, I presume?’

‘Yes.’

‘And I’m presenting this evidence to what?’ Mika asked.

‘To the Jain AIs,’ Dragon replied.

As she stepped out onto the surface of Dragon, she was grateful for the transition to lower gravity, for her legs felt suddenly weak. She halted for a moment, watching the remote haul itself up then fling itself into gliding flight which terminated against the side of the intership craft. It amazed her that the vessel was still intact. Initiating the gecko function of her boots, she walked over to touch the door control and watched the wing door rise. While she waited she noted flickering changes in the light as of an approaching thunderstorm, then spotted a shower of meteors stabbing up beyond Dragon’s horizon. Had there been air to carry sound, she knew she would now be hearing a roar like that of warfare.

‘Tell me about Jain AIs,’ she said.

‘I can give you the few cold facts I have uncovered, and I can give you speculation…’

‘Give me both.’

‘The Jain were warlike. I surmise that they were not as social as human beings, and that what society they did have was as hostile and competitive as that of the Prador. However, they were more technically advanced than the Prador — perhaps like those particular aliens might be in some thousands of years, if their loose-knit society does not self-destruct and if they are not meanwhile exterminated by some other race.’

‘Like maybe the human race?’ Mika ducked into the craft and strapped herself in while the door closed. The remote was now clinging to the canopy above and behind her. When she looked up its blue eyes were peering in at her. It would be accompanying her, it seemed.

‘Like the human race,’ Dragon confirmed. ‘Though you have thus far shown great restraint.’ It continued, ‘The Jain were advanced enough to create their own AIs, and I imagine that those AIs were as hostile and independent as the Jain themselves. I speculate that they were of necessity kept under strict control for a very long time and that their own “Quiet War” against their masters was of a rather different nature than that started by human artificial intelligences.’

‘So they had to be more subtle,’ Mika guessed.

‘Yes. While the human AIs were a critical component in their expansion into space and thus in an easy position to take over, I suspect the Jain AIs were never placed in such a tempting position within Jain society. They were used merely as tools to create other tools… like weapons. The quiet war they conducted was through those weapons, and it was the main weapon, this thing we name Jain technology, that won the war for them.’

Mika said, ‘You mean the Jain employed it in civil war and thus managed to wipe each other out?’

‘That is what I mean.’

‘And the AIs?’

‘Once Jain technology was constructed, it would have been evident that at the end of any conflict it would be the only thing to survive.’

Mika disconnected the craft’s anchors lodged in Dragon’s skin and, using compressed-air impellers, lifted slowly from the surface.

‘I think I begin to understand,’ she said.

‘Do you? Do you really?’

‘They made themselves part of that technology, a component of that technology. It’s just like Polity AIs supposedly being integral to the technology used for travel throughout the Polity. Apparently it is impossible to run a runcible or a U-space engine without an AI in there to control it — and obviously this was something the AIs neglected to mention to the Prador since they themselves travel through U-space and have no AIs.’

‘Yes,’ said Dragon. ‘I see you do understand. However, I must add that, to place themselves where they did, they must first have melded with each other, which must have been difficult for AIs modelled on hostile individualists.’

Mika now lit up a thruster and sent the craft gliding towards the bone forest. She knew she would have to navigate very carefully in there, since it would probably be just as difficult as flying through any normal forest.

Dragon continued, ‘The AIs deliberately made the Jain technology unstable and prone to breaking down without some form of control exercised at a very basic level. That basic level is not even in realspace, but instead is mapped over the impression Jain-tech makes in U-space. This is why it is possible to detect Jain nodes through U-space; this is why the signature is so strong. The Jain AIs are there, wherever Jain technology grows; they propagate one phase space away in order to stabilize it. It is as if the technology is a plant, and the AIs are its roots.’