“I should go see a priest?”

“You think you’re haunted,” he said. “Who else are you going to consult? Look, I’ll set up the contact for you. She’s family. And I bet yours won’t be the only ghost story she’ll have heard in her life.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said, uncertain. “And she’ll be — umm, sympathetic?”

George said ruefully, “We Pooles don’t do sympathy, Michael, even those of us who take holy orders. But you may get some truth from her. If you want therapy, I’ll sell you the robot.”

“You chuffing won’t,” said the robot.

“So,” George said, “how are you feeling now?”

“I have all this stuff swirling around in my head,” I said hesitantly. “Tom. The hydrate deposits. The Kuiper Anomaly. Morag. Each of these seems extraordinary, or tremendously significant, or both. And they are all somehow focusing down on my life. Sometimes I wonder if there is some connection between them.”

His eyes, still the family smoky gray, were bright. “Of course there’s a connection. You. ”

I hadn’t wanted to say it out loud. I looked down at my body, my paunchy belly, my fat legs. “That makes no sense.”

“Actually it’s halfway to madness,” the robot pointed out.

“We aren’t all created equal, Michael. Let me tell you something. You know that the Kuiper Anomaly was discovered in the first decade of the century. But it actually showed up on some old records, images and infrared searches, dating from before the formal ‘discovery.’ It had just never been recognized for what it was. But we have a date, I mean to within a day, when that thing appeared on the edge of the solar system. And you know what that date is?”

Suddenly I felt cold. It was like the feeling I sometimes got before one of Morag’s visitations. “Tell me.”

“The Anomaly appeared on the day you were born. Coincidence?” George leaned back and laughed. “We’re a peculiar lot, we Pooles, a damn peculiar lot. Stuck in history. We can’t help it. Now, are you going to help me up, or do I have to rely on the robot?”

The toy robot watched as I struggled to help him rise, its blank artificial eyes fixed on me suspiciously.

I took the train back to London the next day. I would never see George in the flesh again.

The next day, back aboard Reath’s ship, they prepared to leave the Rustball.

Reath had promised to take Alia back to the Nord. After her disturbing experiences on the Rustball she longed to go home for a spell, back to the familiar sights and smells of the ship, its conceptual freedom compared to the dreadful chthonic rigidity of a world. And she longed to see Drea, above all, to put things right.

But before they left orbit Reath came to her. He seemed uncomfortable. Plans had changed, he said.

The Campocs said they felt she was unready to proceed to the next stage of her Transcendence training. She should see more of the post-human Galaxy, if she aspired to join the body that governed it. So she was to be flown off to some other dismal rocky speck of a world.

Not only that, it turned out, the Campocs wanted to come along, too.

She was bewildered. “Reath, can’t you — I don’t know — appeal to somebody?”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Reath said. “I have to accept what the Campocs say. Otherwise there would be no point coming here.”

“But I want to go home.” Alia was embarrassingly aware of the whine in her voice.

Reath sighed. “I know. Everything will be fine, you’ll see.”

She allowed herself to feel reassured.

But as she watched the Campocs’ ugly, beetlelike shuttle climb up out of their planet’s gravity well once more, she thought back over the exchange. Reath’s control of the situation had somehow been challenged by the Campocs, by Bale and the others. What could they possibly want? She worried at this disturbing development, a shifting in the alignment of the unseen powers that had taken over her life.

The planet to which the Campocs directed them orbited an undistinguished star some three hundred light-years closer to the Galaxy’s center than the Rustball.

The journey was uneventful. Alia spent most of her time immersed in the travails of Michael Poole, trying to shut out the unwelcome complexity of her own life. The Campocs weren’t good company; they kept to themselves throughout the trip. In fact Alia was relieved about that. She had felt uncomfortable with Bale ever since she had figured out that their intimacy must have been shared with his kin.

But, faintly suspicious of the Campocs as she had been since she had met them, she tried tentatively to use her new abilities to sense something of their thinking. It felt eerie to probe for the thoughts and feelings of others with no more difficulty than she might grope for an elusive memory inside her head.

But it worked. She could sense a kind of disciplined excitement shared by the Campocs. It was true they had never traveled much before; this jaunt away from the Rustball was a novelty for them. But there was something else under the surface, she thought, something darker she couldn’t bring into focus. It added to her vague sense of unease; the Campocs had had an agenda concerning her since she had arrived, but she still didn’t know what it could be, what they wanted.

No doubt they could sense what Alia was feeling, too. She tried not to think about that.

At their destination, as Reath’s ship entered orbit, they all crowded to the windows to see the view.

This new world was called Baynix II, after its parent star. It had no name of its own. “Or rather,” Reath said mysteriously, “those who live here have never told us what they call their world — if they are still aware they are on a world at all…”

It was another ball of rock and iron, more or less like Earth, with a scattering of oceans, ice caps, clouds. But where the Rustball had been almost all iron, this world was almost all rock, right to its core.

“It is a Dirtball.” Denh snickered.

Reath said, “Another result of the vicissitudes of planetary impact processing.” He speculated that Baynix II was more like the Moon than Earth, a secondary product of a giant collision, sculpted from the mantle of some larger world.

Alia peered down uneasily. All these worlds seemed to be the products of random acts of immense violence. She couldn’t imagine how it must be to live on such battered fragments.

They all crammed into a small shuttle. It parted from its mother ship, and Alia descended into the air of yet another planet.

There were oceans here, delivered as usual by comets, and a layer of air, mostly carbon dioxide. But the land was ancient, littered with the eroded shadows of features billions of years old, palimpsests of craters and mountain ranges. The native life, battered by radiation, had never progressed beyond single cells, hardy little radiation-resistant bugs. The circumstances of the Dirtball’s difficult birth had left it inhospitable: that shrunken core meant no significant tectonic renewal, and no global magnetic field.

And as far as Alia could see, humans had made little impression here. There were no cities, no farms. A couple of automated monitoring stations, themselves unimaginably old, stood silently, eroded and half-covered by drifting sand. And that was all.

“So why are we here?” Alia asked.

Reath grinned, and allowed the shuttle to dip close to the ground. “For them, ” he said, pointing.

Alia thought the formations on the ground were just geological. They were ridges, low, lumpy, and irregular, the same color as the sandy ground from which they rose. Reath gave her no more clues. Irritated by the mystery, and the sense that everybody knew more about what was going on than she did, Alia refused to ask any more questions.

The flitter landed. The gravity was a little less than standard, not uncomfortable. They disembarked, and waited for the local Mist to prepare them. Alia felt filters in her nose and throat close up against the corrosive dust suspended in the air, and oxygen coolly hissed into her lungs.