Hierchon Ormilla took his defeat with a degree of grace and within a few minutes the chamber was emptied of half its earlier occupants. The stepped sequence of podia in front of the Hierchon’s imposing esuit now looked positively bare. All the court officials and courtiers had departed, with much muttering and the single highest quotient of affronted dignity Fassin had ever witnessed, by several factors. The military bigwigs were still present, but even their on-podium ranks had been depleted as Colonel Somjomion of the Shrievalty and Clerk-Regnant Voriel of the Cessoria were reduced to stepping down to floor level so that they could operate the two most important pieces of equipment monitoring the cooking-pot device embodying the AI. The mirror-finish troopers still stood in a wide circle beyond, armour locked in at-ease, deaf now.

While all this had been going on, Fassin had been left to sit there, not knowing what to think. He knew what he ought to be thinking; he ought to be thinking, What the fuck could I ever have stumbled across that possibly warranted this level of right-to-the-top paranoia and secrecy? It was, however, hard to know what to think. He also knew what he ought to feel: fear. There, he was fine; he had a superabundance of high weapon-grade trepidation. “Thank you,” the image of the Admiral said. “Now then,” it said, looking round all those who remained. “I have a question for you. What do you know of something called the Dweller List?” It held up one hand. “Rhetorical question. You don’t have to answer. Those of you who wish, feel free to consult your screens or equivalent. Take a moment.”

There was a flurry of distant tapping. The Dweller List? thought Fassin. Oh, fucking hell; not that shit.

The hologram smiled. “Let me in due time tell you what we at this end — as we design and record this signal and projection — consider important regarding this subject.”

Fassin had heard of the Dweller List, of course; no Seer hadn’t. Unfortunately, lots of laypeople had heard of the List, too, and so it had become one of those tired, inward-groan-producing subjects that people tended to raise when they met a Seer at a party, along with other hoary old cliché-questions such as, “Do Dwellers really hunt their own children?” and, “Are they really as old as they say they are?”

The Dweller List was a collection of coordinates. It had turned up, as far as anyone could be sure, towards the end of the Burster War four hundred million years earlier, and was probably well out of date even then. Allegedly, the list detailed all the Dwellers’ own secret arteria portals. According to the story, these had been under development since the time of the Long Collapse, when the Dwellers had decided that the other species — or groups of species — with which they were forced to share the galaxy couldn’t be trusted to keep their own or jointly owned “hole networks safe, and so the Dwellers had better construct an arteria web which they controlled — and which preferably nobody else knew about — if they wanted to voyage from gas-giant to gas-giant reliably and without fuss.

This, of course, completely ignored the Dwellers’ attitudes to time and space and scale and more or less everything else. The Dwellers didn’t need wormholes and the near-instantaneous travel between systems that they offered. They lived for billions of years, they could slow their metabolism and thoughts down as required so that a journey of a thousand years or ten thousand years or a hundred thousand years would appear to be over in the course of a single sleep, or occupied no more time than that required to read a good book, or play a complicated game. Plus they were already everywhere; they claimed they had spread throughout the galaxy during the First Diasporian Age, which had ended when the universe was only two and a half billion years old. Even if that claim was a boast, a typical Dweller exaggeration, what was undeniable was that Dwellers were present in significant numbers in well over ninety-nine per cent of all the gas-giant planets in the galaxy, and had been for as long as anybody could remember. (Though not, as it had turned out, Jupiter. Humanity’s own backyard gas-giant was unusual in being relatively water-poor. The Dwellers considered it a desert planet and rarely visited.)

After centuries of real-time and decades of seem-time spent with Dwellers, Fassin had gained the distinct impression that Dwellers both despised and felt sorry for the Quick — the species, like humans, like all the others in the Mercatoria, which felt the need to use wormholes.

As the Dwellers saw it, to be Quick — to live life that precipitously — was to condemn oneself to an early end. Life had an inescapable trajectory, a natural curve. Evolution, development, progress: all conspired to push a sentient species along in a certain direction, and all you could do was choose to run that road or saunter along it. The Slow took their time, adapting to the given scale and natural limits of the galaxy and the universe as it existed.

The Quick insisted on short cuts and seemed determined to bend the very fabric of space to their frantic, impatient will. When they were smart they succeeded in this wilfulness, but they only brought their own end all the quicker. They lived fast and died faster, describing sudden, glorious but quickly fading trails across the firmament. The Dwellers, like the other Slow, wanted to be around for the long term, and so were prepared to wait.

So quite why the Dwellers would ever have bothered building a secret wormhole network was something of a mystery, as was how they had managed to keep it secret all these hundreds of millions of years, not to mention how this fitted in with the rather obvious nature of each different Dweller community’s isolation from each other.

Nevertheless, the myth of the Dweller List continued to excite people in general and conspiracy theorists in particular, especially in times of threat and desperation, when it would be really, really great if a secret wormhole network did exist.

Fassin agreed with the textbooks that it had been no coincidence the List had first turned up during the Burster War, when the whole galactic community had seemed to be falling apart, and people were looking for salvation, for hope, anywhere. Then, the arteria total had been falling from its earlier — and then all-time — high of nearly 39,000 to under a thousand. At the nadir of the Third Chaos there had been less than a hundred “holes in the whole galaxy, and the Dwellers hadn’t stepped in then with an offer to let everybody else use this secret system. If not then, when the light of civilisation seemed to be fading from the great lens entirely, then when? When and why would they ever come galloping to the rescue?

Part of the seductive attraction of the List was its sheer size. It contained over two million sets of alleged portal coordinates, implying more than one million arteria, presumably linked in a single enormous network. At the height of the Third Complex, eight thousand years earlier, there had been exactly 217,390 established wormholes threading the galaxy together, and that was as good, as far as was known, as it had ever got. If the Dweller List genuinely enumerated existing portals and arteria, it would represent the promise of instigating the single greatest change in the history of the galaxy; the sudden linking-up of two million systems, many of which had never had any connection before, the bringing together of almost everybody everywhere — the very furthest, most utterly isolated star would likely be a mere decade or two away from the nearest portal — and the near-instant revitalising, on a scale unheard of in nearly twelve billion years of tenacious, sporadically stuttering civilisation, of the entire galactic community.

It was, Fassin and almost all his fellow Seers had long thought, a forlorn hope. The Dwellers didn’t need or show any sign of using wormholes. Being Dwellers, they naturally claimed they were experts at arteria and portal technology, and certainly they were not afraid of using wormholes, it was just that they didn’t see the need for them… but if they ever had been seriously involved with wormhole production, those days were long gone. In any case, the List itself, which had been lying around in libraries and data reservoirs, multitudinously copied for hundreds of millions of years, accessible to anybody with a link, was not the end of the story; it just gave the rough coordinates of two million gas-giants in two million systems. What was needed was a more precise location.