"In another casket, as are all my colleagues, somewhere else in the ship. I'm sorry that a small white lie was necessary, but everything else I've told you was the truth."

"Everything?" asked Auger. Ca.s.sandra cleared a portion of the wall and created a three-dimensional grid, into which she dropped the tiny form of their ship. It veered and swerved, the ship's lithe, flexible hull bending and twisting with each change of direction. "This is our real-time trajectory," Ca.s.sandra said. "You saw a hint of it when I showed you the captive shuttle. I could have doctored the view-it would have been trivial-but I chose not to. You'd have guessed sooner or later."

"Are we really all right?" Auger said.

"Absolutely," Ca.s.sandra said, "although the healing processes are still taking place. You'll both be good as new by the time we arrive at Tanglewood."

"If we ever get there," she said.

Ca.s.sandra smiled. "Let's err on the side of optimism, shall we? In my experience there's very little point

worrying about something you can't control."

"Even death?"

"Most especially death."

THIRTY-THREE.

Auger was picking her way through an orange when Ca.s.sandra reappeared, stepping through a curtained doorway that rippled in an imaginary breeze.

The girl-shaped Slasher made a chair appear from nowhere, then lowered herself into it. "How are you feeling?"

"This is the best fruit I've ever tasted," Auger replied.

"The best fruit you've never tasted," Ca.s.sandra said, correcting her with an amused smile. "It's rather unfair, of course: how could any real food compare with direct stimulation of the taste centre?"

Being reminded that the orange was a figment of her imagination was enough to kill what little of her appet.i.te remained. "Is this what it's like for you every day?" Auger asked. Beside her, Floyd continued to attack a bunch of grapes.

"More or less."

"I suppose you get used to it, in the end. Being able to experience anything you want, when and wherever you want to..."

"It has its attractions," Ca.s.sandra said. "But so does unlimited access to candy, when you're a child. The simple fact of the matter is that we learn to live with what we have, and the novelty begins to wear off after a while. The machines in my environment can reshape any room-any s.p.a.ce-according to my immediate needs. If the machines can't respond quickly enough, or there's a conflict with someone else's requirements, I can tell other machines in my head to achieve the same thing by manipulating my perceptions. If there's a memory that troubles me, I can erase or bury it, or programme it to surface only when I need some reminder of my shortcomings. If there's an emotion I find unpleasant, I can turn it off or lessen it."

"Like anxiety about the future?"

"Anxiety is a useful tool: it forces us to make plans. But when too much anxiety freezes us into indecision, it needs checking." Ca.s.sandra leaned back in her seat, making the wooden joints creak. She reached for an apple from a bowl on a nearby table and bit into it. "It's a matter of balance, you see. These things may sound miraculous to you, but to me they're simply part of the texture of my life."

Floyd pushed aside his plate. "It sounds like Heaven to me. You can make anything happen, or at least make yourselves think it's happened. And you live for ever."

"Ca.s.sandra's people have no past," Auger said. "We don't have much of one, but what we do have is sacrosanct."

"I'm not sure I follow," Floyd said.

"Everyone alive today is a descendent of someone who was living in s.p.a.ce when the Nanocaust hit," Auger elaborated. "No one on the surface of the planet made it out alive, so we're all descended from the colonists who had already begun to settle the solar system." She looked at the Slasher. "True, Ca.s.sandra?"

"True enough."

"But getting into s.p.a.ce was difficult back then. Every gram had to be accounted for, argued over, justified at the expense of another gram. We didn't bring books when we could make do with digital scans of the texts, preserved in computer memory. We didn't bring films or photographs when we could more easily transport digital versions of them. We didn't even bring animals or flowers, making do with transcriptions of their DNA."

"It went the same way for both of our ancestral peoples," Ca.s.sandra added. "The only difference being that Auger's grouping-the ancestors of the USNE-embraced the digital with slightly less gusto than we did. They were cautious-rightly so, as it happened."

"We brought some physical artefacts into s.p.a.ce," Auger said. "A few books, photographs. Even some animals. It cost us terribly, but we sensed that the storage of so much knowledge in the form of digital records-in the memories of machines-made us vulnerable. After the Nanocaust, when we'd seen machines go wrong on such a scale, we embarked on a crash programme to convert as much of that electronically stored information as possible back into solid, a.n.a.logue format. We made printing presses to produce physical books. We burnt digital images back on to chemical plates. We had factories churning out paper as fast as our printers could swallow it. We even had armies of scribes copying texts back on to paper in longhand, in case the printers failed before the work was done. We did everything we could-everything we could think of doing-to make copies we could touch and smell, like in the old days. It almost worked, too. But we just weren't fast enough."

"We call it the Forgetting," Ca.s.sandra said. "It happened about fifty years after the Nanocaust, when our respective societies had regained some measure of stability and self-sufficiency following the death of Earth. Even now, no one really knows what caused it. Sabotage is sometimes mentioned, but I'm inclined to think it was an accident-just one of those things waiting to happen."

"The digital records crashed," Auger said. "Overnight, some kind of virus or worm spread through every linked archive in the system. Texts were turned into garbled junk. Pictures, movies-even music-were scrambled into senselessness."

"Some archives survived," Ca.s.sandra said. "But after the Forgetting, we could never be certain of their reliability."

"We lost almost everything," Auger said. "All we had left of the past was fragments. It was like trying to reconstruct the entirety of human knowledge from a few books saved from a burning library."

"What about inst.i.tutions?" Floyd asked. "Didn't they keep the originals of all this stuff?"

"They'd been falling over themselves to shred and pulp their paper collections for years," Auger said. "They couldn't do it quickly enough once they'd been sold on the idea that they could reduce all this c.u.mbersome volume to a single sheet of microfiche, or a single optical disk, or a single part.i.tion in a flash memory array, or whatever was being hailed as the latest and best storage medium that week."

"Perfect sound for ever," Ca.s.sandra said, in the manner of someone reciting an advertising slogan. "That, at least, was the idea; it's just such a shame that it didn't actually work. You see now why our people have followed two paths. The Threshers believe that the Forgetting must never be allowed to happen again. To that end, they abstain from the very technologies that could offer them immortality."

"No one's immortal," Auger said sharply. "You're just immortal until the next Nanocaust, or the next Forgetting, or until the Sun blows up. And any one of us is free to defect to the Polities, if we don't like living under the iron rule of the Threshold Committee."

"A fair point," Ca.s.sandra said. "We, on the other hand, have decided not to worry about the past. We've lost it once, so why worry about losing it again? We live in the moment."

She extended her hand and made the room change, expanding it ma.s.sively, the white walls racing away in all directions. Suddenly they were in a s.p.a.ce the size of a cathedral, and then a skysc.r.a.per. It kept on growing, the walls receding until they were kilometres or tens of kilometres away, the ceiling rocketing into the sky until it took on the blue of the atmosphere itself, with a layer of clouds suspended just below it. The room's open window now looked out into star-sprinkled night.

It was a bravura display of control, but Ca.s.sandra wasn't finished. She narrowed her eyes and the distant walls flickered with vast, sculptural detail: fluted columns and caryatids as tall as mountains, b.u.t.tresses and arches leaning across absurd reaches of empty s.p.a.ce. She made stained-gla.s.s windows open into the walls, shot through with light in a spectrum Auger had never imagined. Ca.s.sandra must have been tweaking her brain on a fundamental level, altering her very perceptual wiring. Not only were the colours unfamiliar (and heart-wrenchingly beautiful), but she could hear them, feel them, smell them.

She had never known anything so lovely, so sad, so wonderful.

"Please stop," she said, overwhelmed.

Ca.s.sandra returned the room to its prior dimensions. "I'm sorry," she said to Auger and Floyd in turn, "but I felt that some demonstration was necessary to ill.u.s.trate what I understand as living in the moment. That's the kind of moment I mean."

"I have just one question," Floyd said. "If you can do this, if you can have everything you want, whenever and wherever you want it-then why are some of you so keen on getting your hands on Earth?"

"That's a shrewd question," Ca.s.sandra said.

"So answer it," Auger said.

"We want Earth because it is the one thing we cannot have," Ca.s.sandra said. "And that, for some of us, is intolerable."

Ca.s.sandra was waiting when the veined lid peeled aside. "Well, Auger? Was the reintegration as painless as I predicted?"

"I'll cope. Can you help me out of this thing?"

"Certainly."

Another Slasher was already helping Floyd out of his casket. Auger looked around with bleary eyes while the last remnants of the blue fluid gathered into larger blobs and flowed back into the open maw of the casket.

"Come," Ca.s.sandra said. "I'll bring you up to speed. We're very near Earth."

They returned to the tactical room, which was almost as Auger remembered it except for the absence of

any Slashers. "They're still in their acceleration caskets," Ca.s.sandra explained. "If we need to make a sudden movement, they'll be better able to manage the tactical situation."

"Are we still being chased by Niagara?"

"Niagara-or whoever was in that ship-isn't a problem anymore. It ran into one of our missiles just

before we reached the outer cordon of Tanglewood defences."

"You mean he's dead?"

"Someone's dead. It may or may not be Niagara. If it isn't, we'll find him sooner or later."

"You better had."

"Perhaps if you told me exactly why it was so important to reach Caliskan, I might be able to do a little

more to help you."

"I've told you as much as you need to know," Auger said firmly.

"You only told me half of the story."

"And I'm not quite ready to trust you with the rest of it. Maybe when I've spoken to Caliskan...Are you

close enough to send a tight-beam message to him?" "There'll always be a slight risk of interception...but yes, we're close enough now." With a flourish of her fingers-a gesture that Auger suspected was as much theatrical as anything else-Ca.s.sandra a.s.signed part of the wall as a flat screen. For a moment it was blank, awaiting a response. "You may speak," she said, prompting Auger with a nod of her head.

"What's my location?" she asked.

Ca.s.sandra told her.

"Caliskan," she said. "This is Verity Auger. I believe you wanted to hear from me. I'm alive and well, within half a light-second of Tanglewood. I'm aboard a Slasher s.p.a.cecraft, so you'll have to pull some strings to let me get any closer without all h.e.l.l breaking loose."

A second or two later, the a.s.signed panel lit up with swathes of blocky primary colours, which quickly sharpened into a flickering, low-time-resolution pixel image.

"That's Caliskan?" Floyd said, when the face of the white-haired man had a.s.sumed a recognisable shape.

"The man who sent me to Paris, and the only one who has a hope of sorting out this mess," Auger said.

"Face looks familiar. It's almost as if I know him," Floyd said, peering more closely at the image.

"You can't possibly know him," she said. "You've never met him."

Floyd touched the side of his head, as if in salute. "Whatever you say, Chief."

Caliskan's gla.s.ses flared light back at the camera. "Auger...you're alive. You can't imagine how much this pleases me. Please pa.s.s my thanks on to Ca.s.sandra. I didn't dare believe you'd made it out of the Phobos catastrophe."

"We made it, sir. Both of us did."

She waited for the response. The one-second delay was just long enough to impose a certain stiltedness on the conversation, as if both of them were speaking a language neither felt comfortable with.

"Both of you, Auger? But Skellsgard said that the war babies had killed Aveling and Barton before you

helped her escape."

"And so they did, sir. I'm with a man called Floyd, who was born on E2."

Behind Caliskan, she could make out the ribs, spars and instruments of a s.p.a.cecraft cabin interior: a

modern Thresher ship, but something much less advanced than the Slasher vessel she had woken up inside.