“Can’t say I’ve ever caught it, Fass.”

Fassin frowned, thinking. He decided this probably meant “No’. Why didn’t adults just say no when they meant no?

They sat in the flier. He had to come down off Uncle Slovius’s shoulders but he got to sit beside him in the front. He didn’t even need to tell people he’d be sick if he sat in the back any more. A servant sat on the other side of him. Great-uncle Fimender was behind with two old ladies who were girlfriends. He was laughing and they were too. His mum and dad were further back, talking quiet. His mum and dad were old but Uncle Slovius was really old and Great-uncle Fimender was really, really old.

The flier went up into the air and went through the air making a noise like the Attack-ship Avenger did in Attack Squad Voerin. His model of the Attack-ship Avenger flew but only in Supervised Areas Outdoors and shot guns and missiles and made the same noise. He’d wanted to bring it with him, but not been allowed, even after he’d shouted. He hadn’t been allowed to bring any toys. No toys at all!

He pulled at Uncle Slovius’s sleeve. “Tell me about the Voerin!” He tried to think what had made Uncle Slovius laugh. “More about history!”

Uncle Slovius smiled.

“The Voehn are the Culmina’s bully boys, child,” said Great-uncle Fimender from the seat behind. He was leaning over. His breath had that funny sweet smell like it usually did. Great-uncle Fimender was fond of a drink. His voice was funny also sometimes, like all the words were sort of one big word. “I wouldn’t fixate too enthusiastically on the scum that stole our species birthright.”

“Steady, now, Fim,” Uncle Slovius said. He looked round at Great-uncle Fimender but looked first at the servant except the servant didn’t move or look back or anything. “If the wrong person took you seriously you might find yourself joining this rogue AI. Hmm?” He made a smile at Great-uncle Fimender, who sat back again in the seat between the old-lady girlfriends and took a glass with a drink in it from a picnic tray.

“Be an honour,” he said in a quiet voice.

Uncle Slovius smiled down at Fass. “The Voehn went to Earth a long, long time ago, Fassin. Before humans made spaceships — before they made sea ships, almost.”

“How long ago?”

“About eight thousand years ago.”

“4051BCE,” Great-uncle Fimender said, though only just loud enough to hear. Uncle Slovius didn’t seem to hear. Fassin wasn’t sure if Great-uncle Fimender was disagreeing with Uncle Slovius or not. Fassin stored 4051 BCE away as an Important Number anyway.

“They met human people on Earth,” Uncle Slovius said, “and took them away with them on their ship, to other stars and planets.”

“Kidnapping the prims!” Great-uncle Fimender said. “Sampling the barbs, with prejudice! Eh?” He didn’t sound like he was talking to him and Uncle Slovius. Fass didn’t understand what Great-uncle Fimender was saying anyway. The old-lady girlfriends were laughing.

“Well,” Uncle Slovius said, with a small smile, “who’s to say whether humans were kidnapped or not? People in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia and China were too primitive to know what was going on. They probably thought the Voehn were gods, so they might have gone with them without being kidnapped and we don’t even know that the Voehn took whole people. Maybe they just took their cells.”

“Or babies, or foetuses, or excised a few thousand fertilised eggs,” Great-uncle Fimender said. Then, “Oh, thank you, my dear. Oops! Steady, there.”

“In any event,” Uncle Slovius said, “the Voehn took some human people and put them down on planets far away from Earth and the human people grew up with other people, and the Culmina had the other people help the humans so that they became civilised quickly, and invented all the things humans back on Earth ever invented, but these human people on the other planets always knew they were part of a galactic community, hmm?” Uncle Slovius looked at him with a question-look on his face. Fass nodded quickly. He knew what a galactic community meant: everybody else.

“Anyway, people on Earth kept on inventing things, and eventually invented wormholes and portals—”

“The Attack-ship Avenger goes through wormholes and portals,” he told Uncle Slovius.

“Of course,” Uncle Slovius said. “And so when human people went out and met other alien people and joined their worm-hole up with everybody else’s wormhole, they found out that they weren’t the first humans the alien people had met or had heard of, because the humans who had been taken away to the other planets by the Voehn were already quite well known.”

“Remainder humans,” Great-uncle Fimender said from the seat behind. His voice sounded funny, like he might be going to burst out laughing or something.

Uncle Slovius looked round at him for a short bit. “Well, the terms don’t matter too much, even if they might sound a little harsh sometimes.”

“Carefully chosen to keep us in our place, remind us we owe them, either way,” Great-uncle Fimender said.

“The Culmina tell us they had people look after Earth after the Voehn took the humans away to the other stars. They made sure that nothing bad happened to Earth, like it being hit by a big rock.”

Great-uncle Fimender made a sort of cough-laugh. “Easy to claim.”

Fass looked round at Great-uncle Fimender. He sort of wanted Great-uncle Fimender to be quiet so he could listen to Uncle Slovius but sort of didn’t because the things Great-uncle Fimender was saying, even if he didn’t always understand all of them, seemed to be saying things about the things Uncle Slovius was saying. It was like they sort of agreed and didn’t agree at the same time. Great-uncle Fimender winked at him and gestured towards Uncle Slovius with his glass. “No, no; listen!”

“So, people from Earth got into the stars at last and found that there were aliens everywhere,” Uncle Slovius told him. “And some of them were us!” He smiled a broad smile.

“And there were a lot more of the alien humans than there were of the ones who thought they were humanity,” Great-uncle Fimender said. It sounded like he was sneering. Uncle Slovius sighed and looked ahead.

The flier was flying over mountains with snow on them. In front was a big bit of desert like a circle. Uncle Slovius shook his head and didn’t seem to want to say anything but Great-uncle Fimender did so Fass turned round in his seat and listened to him.

“And they were more technically advanced, these so-called aHumans. Advanced but cowed. Servant species, just like everybody else. While all Earth’s dreams of wild expansion were made to look like so much belly-gas. The answer to ‘Where is everybody?’ turned out to be, ‘Everywhere’, but the stake at the galactic poker game is a wormhole and so we had to fund our own and bring that to the table. Then discover that Everywhere really meant Everywhere, and every damn thing you could see and every damn thing you couldn’t belonged to some bugger: every rock, every planet, moon and star, every comet, dust cloud and dwarf, even the bloody null-foam of space itself was somebody’s home. Land on some godforsaken cinder, pull out a shovel thinking you could dig something, build something or make something of it and next thing you know an alien with two heads was poking both of them out of a burrow and telling you to fuck off, or pointing a gun at you. Or a writ — ha! Worse still!”

He’d never heard Great-uncle Fimender talk so much. He wasn’t sure that Great-uncle Fimender was really talking to Uncle Slovius or to him or even to his two old-lady girlfriends because he wasn’t looking at any of them, he was looking at the picnic table hinged down from the seat in front, maybe looking at the glass and the decanter bottle on it, and looking sad. The two old-lady girlfriends patted him and one smoothed his hair which was very black indeed but still looked old.