Geis brought the bandamyion trotting forward. He was about thirty metres away. He reined the beast in. It stood shaking its wide, tawny head. He leant over the saddle, staring at her.

“Satisfied, Sharrow?” he said. His voice sounded thin and reedy in the cold, salty wind. “Do you know what you’ve done?”

Geis was edging the bandamyion slowly closer, its heavy hooves splashing in the pools of water.

“But you’d ruin that, too, wouldn’t you, Sharrow?” Geis said, still advancing. “You’d wreck that plan like you’ve wrecker everything else, wouldn’t you?”

She just stood there. She wondered what else there was to do. Cold water seeped into her shoes.

“Do you?” Geis shouted.

She looked back at the Sea House. It was its usual massive self. If the Lazy Gun was still causing havoc somewhere inside it, at least it hadn’t yet decided to destroy the whole thing.

She looked back at Geis and shrugged.

“And I once thought I loved you,” Geis said, shaking his head. He said it so softly she hardly heard him.

Geis drew the jewel-encrusted sword from its saddle-sheath and switched it on; its edges were suddenly lined with pink fire. “I’m going to make you the mother of God, Sharrow,” Geis said, urging the bandamyion forward a pace or two.

She wasn’t sure she’d heard him right.

“Girmeyn,” Geis said. “Girmeyn, on Nachtel’s Ghost. He will be the Messiah; a new voice for the new age, a line written under all we’ve done in the last ten thousand years and a new hope for the next ten thousand.

“He’s mine. I had him raised; I held his life, all he was, contained in my hand,” Geis said, holding up the hand gripping the bandamyion’s reins. “I had him brought up, trained, educated. All that you destroyed in there today,” Geis said, nodding at the House behind. her, “all that was to be his birthright, my final gift to him. But you took it away from him. He’s on a Foundation asteroid now; one of mine. That’s where Girmeyn is, Sharrow, and he’s your son.”

Son? she thought.

The bandamyion trotted forward.

“Your son,” he shouted. “Yours and your thief friend! Taken out after you crashed on the Ghost; stored while my clinicians found a way to save it, then grown like a clone; only actually born ten years ago, but aged in the tank and fed the wisdom of ten millennia and a set of perfect, optimised stimuli by an AI devoted to the purpose; and all to my design. So he’s mine, perhaps more than he’s anybody’s. But biologically he’s yours, Sharrow. Have no doubt.”

Son? she thought. Girmeyn?

Who, me? she thought.

She could see the facets in the bandamyion’s dark eyes now, dull glisters in the grey light. She took a step back, then another. She really ought to have gone for the monowheel.

“I would make you the mother of the Messiah, the mother of God, and you’d spit on it, wouldn’t you, Sharrow?” Geis kicked the bandamyion’s sides. The spur terminals buzzed and the animal trotted, rolling its great head. She stepped back.

The sword hanging in Geis’s hand made a humming noise; drizzle spat and hissed when it hit the pink projected edges, producing little wisps of steam. More vapour smoked from the nostrils of the bandamyion as it vented its warmth to the cold air.

“We’re on the brink, Sharrow,” Geis said, raising his voice a little. “Can’t you tell?” He made a show of sniffing the breeze. “Can’t you smell it? We’re right on the cusp of something better, something new and fresh and everything I’ve done has been to prepare for it and make its birth easier. But you’d spoil that too, wouldn’t you, Sharrow? You’d let your vanity, your pride, your own small-minded need for revenge get in the way of a new future for everybody, wouldn’t you?”

Yes, she thought, yes. I’ve been selfish; that’s all I’ve ever been. And what if the fool is right, and there is a new world waiting? Fate knows it’s an old refrain; we always think there’s something better just round the corner and we’re always disappointed, but we have to be right eventually, don’t we?

“That can’t happen,” Geis said quietly, now that he was so close. He nodded slowly. “You’re not armed,” he said. “I suppose I should be thankful. I’m not sure even knowing he was your son and that he’d die with all the rest would stop you, would it?”

She looked from the huge heavy face of the bandamyion up to his eyes. Oh yes, the crystal virus he claimed he’d had implanted in himself for that pre-prepared act of final petulance. She didn’t know if Geis was telling the truth about that or not, but it sounded psychotic enough to be part of his repertoire.

And Girmeyn. Girmeyn now in one of Geis’s space habitats. Even if he wasn’t her son, how could she kill him?

Easily, she thought, standing there with her feet sinking into the watery sand and the stinking breeze blowing about her. All of them, all of it; easily.

How many tyrants had begun by being charming, beguiling, attractive? Still, they all ended up the same.

We are a race prone to monsters, she thought, and when we produce one we worship it. What kind of world, what translation of good could come from all that’s happened here?

She saw them all die again: Miz crumpled in the snow, speared through; Zefla, pale and dying in the pathetic little tent; Dloan falling on the cold hillside; Cenuij tumbling past her into the night (and Feril, hacked, blasted, destroyed, even if a week-younger copy would be revived in the future… and Breyguhn too, sacrificed to Geis’s plans, and all of them; Keteo and Lebmellin, Tard and Roa, Chrolleser and Bencil Dornay, Fate alone knew how many other Solipsists, Huhsz monks and nameless spear carriers; everybody who’d suffered and died since she’d stood on the glass shore of Issier with Geis).

And her mother, she thought, as something within her gave way under the pressure of so much remembered death, and she was five years old again, standing in the wrecked cable car surrounded by smoke and blood and broken glass, crying and screaming, bewildered and terrified while her mother raised herself up, body broken and butchered and put her hand out-to touch, to comfort, to caress, she’d thought, she’d been sure-and pushed her out of the door into that cold gulf of grey.

She remembered the faceless woman in the wheelchair, from her dream, and the little station in the snow and the waiting train that had gone huff, huff, each vertical jettisoning of smoke and steam like breath, like an explosion.

Gunfire. It was the first thing she really remembered; that scarifying, punishing noise as the cable car rocked and blew apart and the bodyguard’s head burst open. It felt like her life began then; it always had. There had been something vague about a mother and warmth and safety from before, but that all happened to somebody else; the person she was had been born watching people die, watching her mother ripped open by a high-velocity bullet and then reach out to push her away and out, a second before the grenade exploded.

All I’ve ever been was made by weaponry and death.

Not armed, she thought. Not armed. I am the Lazy Gun, the last of the eight, and I’m not fucking armed, just got this one stupid, empty gun…

She put her hand in her pocket. Her fingers closed around the HandCannon, feeling the gun’s odd lightness and the wide empty slot in the grip where the magazine should be.

Of course, there might be a round in the breech.

A round in the breech, she thought.

She couldn’t remember if she’d cocked the gun earlier or not. She’d taken the magazine out of the HandCannon when she’d made Molgarin/Chrolleser take the gun, and she’d put it back in when Geis had come along the balcony towards them, but had she cocked the gun then? Had she sent a round into the breech?

She had no idea. Even if she had, she still didn’t know whether whoever had taken the clip back out again had removed a round from the chamber as well.