‘So you can’t fly me to the Commonwealth?’

‘I don’t think so. I’m going to research the Void from here for a while. Maybe if I can analyse its structure, I can learn to fly again. But right now I’m more interested in the Fallers. I don’t understand what they are at all. They don’t plague Querencia like they do Bienvenido.’

‘They’ve always been here,’ she told him. ‘Right from the start. It’s in the Chronicles. Captain Cornelius saw what they were as soon as the ship landed. He founded the first regiment, the Meor, to fight them; then he set up the Watcher Guild to warn everyone when the eggs fall. And the Research Institute so we could learn how to fight them. Without him we would never have survived.’

‘Did you learn that at school?’

‘Yes.’

‘Interesting. So the Fallers were here already when the colony ships were sucked in. They’re probably prisoners, just like us.’

‘Prisoners?’

‘Yes. Haven’t you worked that out yet? The Void is a prison; it consumes your soul for its own twisted purpose. People. Their thoughts. Their minds. They’re like a kind of food that gets sucked up into the Heart.’

‘They live for ever more in glory. Everybody knows that.’

‘Do they indeed? Have you ever seen this glory? Always demand proof of nirvana before you start following messiahs who’re selling it to you. Those guys don’t exactly have the greatest track record in the universe.’

‘You doubt the Skylords’ Guidance?’ she asked, shocked.

‘I doubt any system that won’t reveal its purpose, that only offers promises of a better tomorrow. But then I’m just a thousand-year-old cynic. You have to make up your own mind, Kysandra. And to do that, you need information. A lot of information.’

She looked round the cabin, surprised she could feel so deflated on the day she’d discovered the truth of the universe. ‘I want to learn,’ she told him, ‘it’s all I ever really wanted.’ Somewhere at the back of her mind a hope was burning that the ship would carry a library, maybe even bigger than the public one at Adeone.

‘I can help you do that,’ he said. ‘I might not be able to take you to the Commonwealth, but I can certainly bring the Commonwealth to you. Think of it as payment for you providing me with cover here. How does that sound?’

Kysandra smiled in a way she hadn’t for the last eight years.

*

‘Lie back, this won’t hurt,’ Nigel said.

Kysandra didn’t believe him. But she lay back anyway. The medical chamber – a cylinder like a silver coffin – had slipped out of the cabin’s wall. Its oval top had done that magical contraction thing, revealing a padded mattress inside.

‘I’ll keep it open,’ Nigel said. ‘It can be a bit claustrophobic in there if you’re not used to it.’

Kysandra didn’t trust herself to speak. All she concentrated on was the very firm belief that this was nothing to do with the Fallers. She wasn’t going to get eaten. Probably.

‘Here we go.’ Nigel’s grin was reassuring. The silver sides of the capsule sprouted slim tendrils that moved like serpents. They began to prod and poke at her body. She’d removed the dress for the chamber to do whatever it did, but Nigel assured her she could keep her underwear on. More of the tendril things were emerging round her head, a dense cluster of them wriggling through her hair. She swallowed hard, trying to be brave.

‘You’re doing fine. Keep still.’

‘This is your doctor?’ she asked.

‘Sort of, yes. Though it can do a lot more than just cure you.’ He closed his eyes, but his expression was one of concentration, as if he was reading something.

Can it get rid of zits?

‘Interesting.’

‘What is?’ she asked.

‘You said Captain Cornelius landed three thousand years ago?’

‘Yes.’

‘That gives us a conservative estimate of a hundred and twenty generations. There’s been some drift in your Advancer sequences; several of them have broken down. I can’t believe the Void’s been screwing with your DNA on top of everything else. Of course, we haven’t had a hundred-generation baseline in the Commonwealth to compare it with, and most of our generations are still factoring in improvements every twenty years. But that level of reversion will be something for the geneticists to watch out for.’

‘Oh.’ Whatever that meant.

He opened his eyes and grinned. ‘Commonwealth citizens have certain additional biological . . . er, abilities built in to their original bodies. They’re specialist cells which help you communicate over distance, like a ’path voice but a lot faster and more sophisticated. Memory can be organized, too, rather than nature’s rather random method.’

‘And I don’t have them any more?’

‘You do, but they’re slightly degraded. And disconnected from your brain.’

‘So I can’t learn Commonwealth stuff like you said?’

He grinned at her disappointed expression. ‘There are always alternatives. I’ll insert some replacement neural pathways into the macrocellular clusters to integrate your secondaries. That’s a standard med repair. Then there are new vectors for the other Advancer features. It will be a while before the reseqencing takes effect.’

Nope: still don’t have a crudding clue what you’re saying.

It had been a year since Kysandra had stopped going to Mrs Brewster’s school every other weekend. She really missed it; school had been the one part of her life that had carried on as normal. With the teacher’s clever gifts and tutelage she’d quickly mastered the basics: reading, writing, arithmetic. Mrs Brewster was the only person left she could talk to about the amazing things she read in her father’s books. And the teacher had told her all about the university in Varlan, where people did nothing but read and learn all day long. That sounded pretty much like a piece of Giu to Kysandra. ‘It’s worth applying,’ Mrs Brewster had suggested as her sixteenth birthday approached.

To which Sarara had retorted: ‘She’ll do just fine as a farmer’s wife, so don’t you go filling her head with dreamy nonsense. She needs to get ready for real life.’ That was the last time she’d been allowed to go to the school.

Now Nigel promised her knowledge beyond anything she’d ever read on Bienvenido. The truth about the whole universe.

Something pinched the back of her skull.

‘Ouch.’

‘Sorry,’ Nigel said absently.

Obscurely, Kysandra felt better. I knew it would hurt.

Nothing much happened for a few minutes, then all the silver tendrils withdrew and flattened out against the sides of the capsule, blending into the metal casing.

‘You can get dressed now,’ Nigel said.

She turned her back to him to put her dress on. Ridiculous.

‘So this is going to be like ’path gifting?’ she asked.

‘Sort of, yes.’

When they left the spaceship, she was sure there were more neuts milling round outside than when she went in.

‘What sort of mods are you adapting?’ she asked as they took the fabric boat back across the river. And to think, an hour ago she’d been impressed by that.

‘Ge-monkeys and chimps, mainly. Like your dwarfs and apes. They’ll be the most useful to start with.’

‘So ge-forms come from the other planet the ships landed on?’

‘Yes.’

She looked up into the sky with its high drifting cloud ribbons. ‘Where is it?’

‘Querencia? I’m not sure. Some of the nebulas are the same. Your Giu is their Odin’s Sea, and Uracus is Honious to them. But nothing else is the same. The Void may have different internal pockets, like segments in an orange, if you like; or the quantum geometry spacetime equivalent here is folded more than we realized.’

‘I think I need to wait for the Commonwealth giftings. Tell me what life was like on the other Void world.’

‘They found Makkathran, which had a city section modified by a species that came to Querencia before humans. It was abandoned, so I guess they were all consumed by the Heat, whoever they were. Makkathran made life a little easier for the Querencia humans, so it shaped their society slightly differently to yours, from what I’ve seen so far.’