· Image?

… Told image expect… specific image…

— Ah. I have an image with me. How… ? Where, I mean what do I show it to, so you can see it?

… No… describe…

— Okay. It’s an image of white clouds in a blue sky.

… Accords…

— So you can tell me? Where Leisicrofe is?

… Went…

· When did he go?

… Measure time how you… ?

— Standard system?

… Known… being Leisicrofe went 7.35 x 10° seconds ago…

Fassin did the calculation. About twenty years earlier.

He was nestled into the outer regions of the Clouder’s mind, the little gascraft resting gently between two broad strands of gas a fraction less cold than the surrounding chill of deep space. He was, in effect, delving, stopped right down to talk to something that made a deep, slow-timing Dweller look like a speed-freak. Clouders thought surpassingly slowly.

A signal from outside, from the Velpin. To the Clouder he sent,

— Where did Leisicrofe go?

Then he clicked up to normal speed.

“Are you going to be much longer?” Y’sul asked, sounding irritable. “I am rapidly running out of patience with this bilateral monomaniac. It’s been ten days, Fassin. What’s happened? Fallen asleep?”

“I’m going as fast as I can. Only been a few tens of seconds for me.”

“You could just stay and think at normal speed, you know. Give us all time to mull over whatever this gas-brain’s saying. No need to go doing this show-off delving stuff.”

“Less of a conversation that way. This shows respect. You get more out of people if you—”

“Yes yes yes. Well, you just carry on. I’ll try and find more games to keep this split-personality cretin occupied. You rote off and commune with this space-vegetable. I’ll do the real hard work. Sorry I came along now. If I’ve missed any more good battles while I’ve been away…’ His voice faded into the distance.

Fassin descended into extreme slow-time again. The Clouder still hadn’t replied.

At least this time there was no insane spiralling. There was the same fuzzy, low-reliability screen to distract them as they wafted away from the Clouder and made for the hidden wormhole mouth, and the doors out of the passenger compartment were just as locked, but there was no fierce spinning. Fassin let Quercer Janath take over the gascraft remotely and turn off its systems. He didn’t bother to clear any of the shock-gel or turn the faceplate clear this time, he just put himself into a trance. It was easy, a lot like preparing to go down into slow-time. And it meant he couldn’t see or hear Y’sul complaining about the ignominy of being zapped unconscious just because they were going on a space journey.

They were making for somewhere called Mavirouelo — yet another place Fassin had never heard of. This was where Hoestruem had said that Leisicrofe was going next. The Clouder hadn’t known if this was a system, a planet, another Clouder or what. Quercer Janath had gone silent for a moment when they heard the name, and Fassin had sensed them consulting the ship’s crude galactic atlas. They declared that they knew the place. A planet, in the Ashum system. (Fassin, or at least the gascraft’s memory, did know of this place. It was even connected, with its own Mercatorial-controlled wormhole, though Fassin suspected they wouldn’t be using it.) Total travel time to be expected was “a few days’.

As he slid into unconsciousness, Fassin’s thoughts were of how beautiful the Clouder had looked. The vast being was like a million great long gauzy scarves of light, a whisper of matter and gravity close to nothingness that massed more than many solar systems, drifting yet purposeful, intent by ancient decision, along a course charted out over millions of years, propelled, dirigible by minute flexings of cold plasmas, by the force of near-not-there-at-all magnetic fields, by sigh-strength expulsions and drawings-in of interstellar material. Cold and dead-seeming yet alive and thinking. And beautiful, in the right light. Seen in a fitting wash of wavelengths, there was something endlessly, perfectly sublime about…

* * *

Saluus stood on a balcony of ice and metal, looking out at the view, his breath misting in the air before him.

The Shrievalty retreat was embedded in and partially sculpted from the frozen waterfall Hoisennir, a four-hundred-metre-high, klick-wide cliff of ice marking where the river Doaroe began its long fall from the high semi-arctic plateau towards the tundra and plains beyond. A low winter sun provided a grand display of Sepektian clouds and a fuzzy purple-red sunset, but nowhere near enough heat to start melting the ice.

Sepekte wobbled slowly and not especially significantly. Its arctic and antarctic circles, where the sun alternately never set or never rose during the heights of summer and depths of winter, were less than a thousand kilometres in diameter. Officially classed as a hot\temperate planet by human standards, its winters were longer but less severe than those of Earth and their worst effects were confined to smaller areas than on humanity’s original home. But the Hoisennir waterfall was far north and high up in the arctic-shield mountains, and the Doaroe spent standard years at a time entirely frozen.

The place was called a retreat because it was owned by the Shrievalty, but as far as Saluus was concerned it was just a hotel and conference centre. The view was impressive, though, when there was sufficient daylight actually to see it properly. It had a certain severe appeal, Saluus was prepared to grant.

Saluus didn’t like being here, all the same. He wasn’t keen on places that he couldn’t get away from easily — preferably, if the worst came to the worst, by just walking. To get away from here meant an air-car or a lift up or down the interior of the frozen fall to the landing ground on the ice of the solidified river above, or down to the vac-rail station on the shore of the frozen lake at the foot of the cliff. When he’d found out where the conference on the Dweller Embassy was to be held — at fairly short notice, for security reasons — he’d made sure to have a parasail packed with his luggage, just so that he had an emergency way out, if it came to it.

He knew that almost certainly there wouldn’t be any emergency — or if there was it would be something so big and-or quick that there would be no getting away from it — but he felt better, safer having the parasail by the balcony window of his bedroom. Most of the other important attendees had suites far inside the fall, to be further away from anything that might come at them from outside, but Saluus had insisted on an outside suite, one with a view, a way out. He hadn’t parasailed for decades but he’d rather risk his neck that way than cowering at the back of a suite, whimpering, just waiting for death.

He sometimes wondered where this obsession with being able to get away came from. It wasn’t something he’d been born with or picked up as the result of some traumatic experience in childhood, it was just something that had sort of crept slowly up on him all the way through his adult life. One of those things, he supposed. He hadn’t bothered wasting any time thinking really deeply about it.

All that mattered, Saluus supposed, was that the retreat\hotel was as safe a place to be as anywhere was, these days. The attacks on Ulubis system had gone on, never slackening off for very long, never really reaching any sort of peak. Many of the targets were obvious military ones, often attacked with bombs, missiles and relatively short-range weapons. These were usually blamed on the Beyonders. Other targets had cultural or morale value or were just big. These were the kind that were hit from deep space, with high-velocity, sometimes near-light-speed boosted rocks. The number of such attacks had increased even as the weight of assaults by drone craft carrying beam weapons and missiles had decreased.