"I accept I am trapped," she said. "I accept little else."

"Trapped in the past? You shouldn’t think of it like that. We have been brought to a new era — in many ways a better era, a golden age in man’s history. Think of it, Shira; the humans of this era are looking outward, only beginning to explore the potentialities of the universe in which they are embedded, and of the resources of their own being. They have banished many of the ills — social as well as physiological, hunger, disease, untimely death — which, thanks to the Qax, our lost contemporaries endure. There are many projects here for you to—"

"You don’t understand," she snapped. "I do not mean trapped merely in the past. I mean trapped in the future. Thanks to the destruction of the Project by the insane arrogance of Michael Poole, I am trapped in this single, doomed timeline."

"Ah. Your vision of globally optimized event chains—"

"Don’t speak to me of visions, collaborator." Her words were delivered in an even, matter-of-fact tone, and were the more stinging for that. "What visions have sustained you?"

He felt the muscles of his cheeks twitch. "Look, Shira, I’m trying to help you. If you want to insult me, then that’s fine. But sooner or later you’re going to have to accept the fact that, like me, you’re trapped here. In the past."

She turned her head away again, quite gracefully, and bowed it toward her knees; her body rocked a little in the air. "No," she said.

He began to feel irritated. "What do you mean, ‘no’? Once the damn Interface is closed down you’ll have no way back to the future."

Now, unexpectedly, she smiled. "No shortcut. No, I accept that. But there is another way back. The longer way."

He frowned.

She went on, "I mean to accept AntiSenescence treatment here. If I’m offered it, or can buy it. And then—"

" — and then it’s a simple matter of living through fifteen centuries — fifty generations — and waiting for the reemergence of singularity technology. So you can start all over again. Is that what you mean?"

Her smile lingered.

"How can you think in such terms?" he demanded. "You got to know Michael Poole; after two centuries of life his head was so full of detritus, of layers of experience, that at times he could barely function. You saw that, didn’t you? Why did you think he spent decades, literally, alone in that GUT ship in the cometary halo? And you’re talking, almost casually, about lasting more than seven times as long. How can any purpose endure through such an immense time scale? It’s — beyond the human…"

The girl did not reply, but her smile lingered on, inwardly directed; and Parz, despite his superiority in years to this girl, felt as if he had become something weak and transient, a mayfly, beside the immense, burning purpose of Shira.

Harry crystallized into the empty couch beside Michael. The image was weak and wavering, the pixels crowding and of uneven size — evidently Harry didn’t have available the processing power he’d used earlier — but there was at least an illusion of solidity, of another presence in the lifedome, and Michael felt grateful enough for that.

Michael lay back in his couch, trying to achieve a state of inner, and outer, relaxation, but he was betrayed by knots of tension in his forehead, his neck, his upper back. He watched the Interface portal blossom open above his head. It spanned most of the dome now. The Spline warship, with the Crab embedded within, was moving along a trajectory that passed the cheek of Jupiter tangentially; and from Michael’s point of view the portal now hung against a backdrop of velvet space, of distant, inhabited stars. The portal’s clean blue-violet geometry — and the burnished-gold effect of the glimmering faces of the tetrahedron, the shadowy reflections of other times and places — were really quite beautiful.

Harry said, his voice a scratch. "I suppose you do know what you’re doing."

Michael couldn’t help but laugh. "It’s a bit late to ask that now."

Harry cleared his throat. "I mean, this whole caper has been improvised. I just wondered if you had any clearer ideas about your precise intentions than when, say, you were ramming a lump of comet ice down the throat of a Spline warship from the future."

"Well, it worked, didn’t it?"

"Yeah, through sheer luck. Only because the Spline was bemused by causality stress, and poor old Jasoft started setting fire to the Spline’s nervous system."

Michael smiled. "It wasn’t luck. Not really. What beat the Qax in the end was their own damned complacency. Jasoft was a loophole, a weakness, which they brought back through time with them. If it hadn’t been for Jasoft Parz they would have left some other hole, another Achilles heel for us to exploit. They were so certain they could scrape us out of the Solar System without any trouble, so certain there was nothing we could do to resist them—"

"All right, all right." Harry threw up his ghostly hands. Come on, Michael. How are we going to destroy the wormhole?"

"I don’t know for sure."

"Oh, terrific." Harry’s face turned fuzzy for a moment and Michael imagined more processing power being diverted from the image. Now the image downgraded further, until the illusion of a solid presence in the chair beside Michael was almost lost.

"Harry, is there some problem? I thought we were on routine running until we hit the Interface."

Harry’s voice came to him through a sea of phasing and static. "It’s those drones," he said. "They’re just too damn smart."

"I thought you had them under control. You organized them to cast off the eye chamber with Shira and Parz, cut the nerve trunk—"

"Yeah, but I’m not experienced at handling them. Remember they’re not simple remotes; they have a lot of processing power of their own. It’s like — I don’t know — like trying to get work done by a few thousand strong-willed ten-year-olds. Michael, one bunch of them has gone ape. They’ve formed into a raiding party; they’re working through the carcass in search of the high-density power sources. They’re being resisted because the damage they’re doing is going to be detrimental to the functioning of the Spline in the long run. But the resistance isn’t organized yet… and any drone that opposes them is chewed up by those damn little laser jaws of theirs."

Michael laughed. "What’s going to be the outcome?"

"I don’t know… The raiders are heading for the Heart of the Spline, now. And I mean the Heart, literally; a city block of power cells and muscle stumps centered around the hyperdrive unit. The area of greatest energy density. If the raiders get through there’ll be hell to pay; the rest of the ship’s systems will be too drained of power to be able to do anything about it, and ultimately they’ll decommission the hyperdrive… But it might not get that far. Other drones are forming up to oppose them. It looks as if there’s going to be a pitched battle, soon, somewhere in the region of the Heart. But at the moment my money is on the rogue, rebel drones; the defenders just haven’t got the leadership—"

Michael cut in, "Oh, for God’s sake, Harry, will you shut up about the drones? Who cares about the damn drones, at a time like this?"

Harry frowned, blurred. "Look, Michael, this isn’t a joke. These rebels could disable the hyperdrive out from under us. And you want to use the hyperdrive in your scheme to wreck the Interface, don’t you?"

"What’s the time scale for all this?"

Harry turned away, flickering. "Twenty minutes for the battle to resolve itself. Another ten for the rebels, assuming they win, to cut their way into the Heart and get to the hyperdrive and other power sources. Let’s say thirty, total, at the outside, before we lose hyperdrive functionality."