And in this bubble, where the freezing of spacetime was undone, the monads awoke again; in their supracosmic froth, they were once more briefly alive.

The monads considered the bubbling foam around them.

They dug into a reef of spindrift, selected a tangle of possibilities, picked out one evanescent cosmic jewel. This one — yes. They closed around it, as if warmed by its glow of potentialities.

And, embedding themselves in its structure, they prepared to shape it. The monads enriched the seedling universe with ineffable qualities whose existence few of its inhabitants would even guess at.

The new universe, for all its beauty, was featureless, symmetrical — but unstable, like a sword standing on its point. Even the monads could not control how that primordial symmetry would be broken, which destiny, of an uncountable number of possibilities, would be selected.

Which was, of course, the joy of it.

For the inhabitants of this new cosmos, it began with a singularity: a moment when time began, when space was born. But for the monads, as their chaotic Ur-reality froze out once more into a rigid smoothness, the singularity was an end: for them, the story was already over. Encased in orderly, frozen spacetime, they would slumber through the long ages, until this universe in turn grew old and spawned new fragments of chaos, and they could wake again.

But all that lay far in the future.

There was a breathless instant. The sword toppled. Time flowed, like water gushing from a tap.

History began.

Chapter 36

So Pirius Red and Torec, having completed a circuit across the face of the Galaxy that had taken them all the way to Earth, returned at last to where they had started.

The flight through the complicated geometry of Arches Base lifted Pirius’s heart. Past the asteroids that wheeled like fists, he made out the burning sky of the Core, the giant stars and light-year-long filaments of glowing gas, the endless explosion of astrophysics beyond. Compared to the cold clockwork emptiness of Sol system, out on the Galaxy’s dead fringe, where you couldn’t even see the Core, this crowded, dangerous sky teemed with life and energy.

“Lethe, it’s good to be home,” he said with feeling.

When they disembarked, Captain Seath herself greeted them. She allowed the Commissary to pump her hand, and nodded curtly to Pirius and Torec. But Pirius read the expression on her reconstructed face. Whatever they had achieved in Sol system, they would always be two jumped-up ensigns to her. It was almost reassuring.

Seath told them that the accommodation for the new “squadron” that was being formed to carry out Nilis’s “project” — she pronounced those words with unmistakable disdain — wasn’t ready yet. So Nilis was offered a room in Officer Country, while Pirius and Torec were taken to a Barracks Ball.

They walked into the big central space of bunks and lavatories. They hadn’t been assigned to this Barracks Ball before. It stank, of course, as all barracks did, of piss and sweat, food and disinfectant, but it didn’t smell familiar. And among the ranks of faces that peered at them, with curiosity, apathy, or hostility, there was nobody they knew.

They were assigned bunks a couple of blocks apart. Torec stroked Pirius’s back, and made her way to her own bunk. Pirius unpacked his few personal effects, and stripped out of his gaudy dress uniform, which made him feel a little better.

But he did this surrounded by staring faces. It wasn’t just the curiosity of cadets confronted by a stranger. They gazed at him as if he had two heads. They said nothing to him, and he had nothing to say to them. They snubbed him when he went to get food. Even when he lay down in the dark, he sensed the strangers around him watching him, assessing him — excluding him.

They looked so young, he thought, their faces blank, like desks empty of data. They were like children. And what was happening to him was childish, as the factions and cliques of the barracks combined to bully a new victim. It was just as Nilis had said: they might look like adults, and they would have to fight and die for mankind. But they were not long out of childhood, and every now and again it showed.

Childish it might be, but the pressure was extraordinary.

He clambered out of bed, made his way to Torec’s bunk, and crawled in beside her. They lay nested together, his belly against her back.

“We said we wouldn’t do this,” she whispered. “We have to fit in.”

“I couldn’t stand it anymore,” he replied. “Don’t throw me out.”

After a time she turned over and kissed his forehead.

In many ways she was the stronger one. But he sensed that she was as glad he was there, as he was to be there. They clung to each other, innocent as children themselves, until they fell asleep.

The next morning Captain Seath led them to a flitter. The little ship slid out of port and threaded its cautious way through the crowded sky.

Seath asked coolly, “Sleep well?”

“No, sir,” Pirius said honestly.

Torec said, “Captain, I don’t understand. Why does everybody hate us?”

“I don’t imagine they hate you.”

Pirius said, “We’re just the same as we were before.”

Seath eyed him. “No,” she said, “you’re not. You’ve done extraordinary things. You’ve seen Earth, Ensign. Even I can’t begin to imagine it. And you’ve been close to power, closer than anybody here, closer than me, closer even than the base commanders. You have changed. And you can’t change back.”

“There’s no place for us on Earth,” Pirius said.

Seath laughed. “There’s no place for you here.”

“Where, then?” Torec asked.

“Why, nowhere.” She shrugged. “It’s not your fault. It’s just the way of things. The only people who understand you are each other — and each other is all you will ever have. You’ll just have to get on with it.”

As she said that, Pirius felt Torec moving subtly away from him. He sensed a return of her old resentment: they had come all the way back to Arches, and she still couldn’t get away from him.

The base for Nilis’s pet squadron was just another rock among the hurtling asteroids of Arches. Known only as Rock 492, it was a kilometer-wide lump of debris. On its battered surface was a cluster of buildings of bubble-blown rock, and a few broad pits that had once been landing pads and dry docks. But all this was long abandoned.

They had to climb out of the flitter in their skinsuits.

The buildings, long stripped of anything usable, were so old their surviving walls were pocked with micrometeorite craters, and a thin silt of dust had gathered around the bases of their walls. Some of their domes had cracked open altogether.

Only one of the buildings was airtight to regulation standard. When they clambered inside, through a temporary airlock hastily patched into a hole in the wall, they found themselves in a cavernous hollow. Bots crawled over the floor and roof, patching up defects. But even the bots looked old and worn out, and the engineers who supervised them weren’t much better. There was no gravity in here — or rather, only the micro-gravity of the asteroid, just a feather touch — and the light, cast by a few hovering globes, was misty, the air a shining silver-gray.

Pirius cracked his faceplate and took a deep breath. The air was stale, so lacking in oxygen his chest ached, and it stank of oil and metal, and of the burning smell of raw asteroid dust, oxidizing busily. As the irritating dust got to work on his sinuses he started to sneeze.

“Lethe,” he said. “Is this it?”