Volyova saw it first.

She was waiting for the Infinity to finish her off; watching the vast conic form of the vessel, dark as night, visible only because it blocked starlight, edging closer towards her with sharklike deliberation. Doubtless somewhere in its hugeness, systems were pondering over the matter of how to expedite her death in the most interesting manner. That was the only explanation for why it had not already killed her, since she was within strike-range of every one of its weapons. Perhaps Sun Stealer's presence aboard the ship had given it a kind of sick sense of humour; a desire to put her to death with sadistic slowness; a process that commenced with this deathly wait for something to happen. Her imagination was now her worst enemy, efficiently reminding her of all the systems which might suit Sun Stealer's purpose; the defences which could boil her over hours, or dismember her without killing her immediately (lasers which were tuned to cauterise flesh, for instance), or crush her (a squad of external servitors, for instance). Oh, the processes of her mind were a glorious thing. And it was, by and large, that same fertility which had given rise to so many possible modes of execution.

But then she saw it.

The flash, sparking from the surface of Cerberus, briefly marking the spot where the bridgehead was installed. It was as if, for a split second, a tremendous light had ignited within the world, only to be immediately dimmed.

Or a tremendous explosion.

She watched entrails of rock and scalded machinery puff into space.

Khouri took a moment to come to terms with the fact that she was not actually dead, despite the certainty she had felt that this would come to pass. At the very least, she had expected to wake transiently to pain, her last moments of consciousness before Hades pulled her apart; body and soul flensed by the monstrous talons of gravity around the neutron star. She had also expected to wake to the worst headache since the Mademoiselle had invoked her buried memories of the Dawn War. But this time it would be a headache of purely chemical origin.

They had found the drinks cabinet in the spider-room.

And they had drunk it empty.

But her head felt achingly clear of any intoxication, like a freshly scrubbed window. She had come to consciousness swiftly as well, with no groggy transition, as if there had been no existence in the instant before her eyes opened. But it was not in the spider-room. Now that she thought about it, she remembered waking; remembered the terrible onset of those tides; how she and Pascale had crawled to the midpoint of the room to lessen the differential stresses. But it had surely failed; they had known at that point there was no possible way to survive; that the only thing they could do was to somehow lessen the pain---- Where in hell's name was she?

She had awakened with her back against a hard surface, unyielding as concrete. Above, the stars cartwheeled with insane speed through the sky, and there was something wrong with the way they moved; as if seen through a thick lens which stretched from horizon to horizon. She found she could move and struggled to her feet, almost toppling back as she did so.

She was wearing a suit.

She had not been wearing one in the spider-room. It was the same kind that she had used during her surface activities on Resurgam; the same kind that Sylveste would have taken with him into Cerberus. How could this be? If this experience was a dream, then it was unlike any she had known, because she could consciously question its contradictions without the whole edifice crumbling around her.

She was on a plain. It was the colour of cooling metal; almost but not quite bright enough to hurt the eye. It was as flat as a beach after the tide had retreated. The plain, now that she looked at it more closely, was patterned; not randomly, but in the intricately ordered manner of a Persian carpet.

Between each level of patterning was another, until the ordering teetered on the edge of the microscopic and probably plunged down to even smaller realms, towards the subnuclear and the quantum. And it was shifting; blurring in and out of focus, never the same from moment to moment. Eventually it started to make her feel vaguely unwell, so she snapped her attention away to the horizon.

It seemed very close indeed.

She started walking. Her feet crunched into the flickering ground. The patterns rearranged themselves to create smooth stepping stones where she could plant her feet.

Something lay ahead.

It rose above the close curve of the horizon: a slight mound, a raised plinth stark against the tumbling starscape. She approached it, and as she neared it she saw movement. The raised part was like the entrance to a subway, three low walls enclosing a series of descending steps, burrowing into the world.

The movement was a figure emerging from the depths; a woman. She heaved herself up the steps with strength and patience, as if she were taking the morning air for the first time. Unlike Khouri, she wore no spacesuit. In fact, she was dressed in exactly the way Khouri remembered her from the last time they were together.

It was Pascale Sylveste.

'I've been waiting a long time,' she said, her voice carrying across the airless black space between them.

'Pascale?'

'Yes,' she said, and then qualified herself. 'In a manner of speaking. Oh dear; this isn't going to be easy to explain -- and I've had so long to rehearse it...'

'What happened, Pascale?' It seemed impudent to ask her why she wasn't wearing a suit; why she wasn't dead. 'Where is this?'

'Haven't you guessed yet?'

'Sorry to disappoint you.'

Pascale smiled sympathetically. 'You're on Hades. Remember that? The neutron star; the one which was pulling us in. Well, it wasn't. A neutron star, I mean.'

'On it?'

'On it, yes. I don't think you were expecting that.'

'No; you could say that.'

'I've been here as long as you have,' Pascale said. 'Which is only a few hours. But I've spent the time beneath the crust, where things happen a bit quicker. So it seems like considerably more than a few hours to me.'

'How much more?'

'Try a few decades... although time really doesn't pass at all here, in some respects.'

Khouri nodded, as if all this made perfect sense. 'Pascale... I think you need to explain...'

'Good idea. I'll do it on the way down.'

'The way down where?'

She beckoned Khouri towards the stairs which descended into the cherry-red plain, as if she were inviting a neighbour indoors for cocktails.

'Inside,' Pascale said. 'Into the matrix.'

Death had still not come.

Over the next hour, using the suit's image-zoom overlay, Volyova watched the bridgehead slowly lose its form, like a piece of pottery being inexpertly shaped. Gradually it began to dissolve into the crust. It was being digested, having finally lost the battle against Cerberus.

Too soon; too soon.

The wrongness of it gnawed into her. She might be about to die, but she did not like seeing one of her creations fail, and -- dammit -- fail so prematurely.

Finally, unable to take any more, she turned towards the ship, pointing towards her with daggerlike intent, and spread her arms wide. She had no idea if the ship was capable of reading her vocal transmissions.

'Come on then, svinoi. Finish me off. I've had enough. I don't want to see any more. Get it over with.'

A hatch opened somewhere down the ship's conic flank, briefly aglow with orange interior lighting. She half expected some nasty and dimly remembered weapon to cruise out; perhaps something she had knocked together in a spasm of drunken creativity.

Instead a shuttle emerged, and powered slowly towards her.

The way Pascale told it to Khouri, the neutron star was in fact nothing of the sort. Or at least it had been once, or would have been -- had it not been for interference by some third party Pascale declined to talk about in any great detail. But the gist was simple. They had converted the neutron star into a giant, blindingly fast computer -- one that, in some bizarre manner, was able to communicate with its own past and future selves.

'What am I doing here?' Khouri asked, as they descended the stairway. 'No, better question: what are we doing here? And how do you know so much more than me all of a sudden?'

'I told you; I was in the matrix for longer.' Pascale paused on one of the steps. 'Listen, Khouri -- you might not like what I'm about to tell you. Namely, that you're dead -- for now, at least.'

Khouri was less surprised by this than she had expected. It seemed almost predictable.

'We died in the gravitational tides,' Pascale said matter-of-factly. 'We got too close to Hades, and the tides pulled us apart. It wasn't very pleasant, either -- but most of your memories of it were never captured, so you don't recall them now.'

'Captured?'

'According to all the normal laws, we should have been crushed to atoms. And in a sense we were. But the information which described us was preserved in the flow of gravitons between what remained of us and Hades. The force that killed us also recorded us, transmitted that information to the crust...'

'Right,' Khouri said slowly, prepared to take this as given for the time being. 'And once we were transmitted into the crust?'

'We were -- um -- simulated back to life. Of course, computation in the crust happens much faster than realtime -- which is why I've spent several decades of subjective time in it.'

She sounded almost apologetic.

'I don't remember spending several decades anywhere.'

'That's because you didn't. You were brought to life, but you didn't want to stay here. You don't remember any of that; you chose not to, in fact. There was nothing to keep you here.'

'Implying there was something to keep you here?'

'Oh yes,' Pascale said, with wonder. 'Oh yes. We'll come to that.'

The stairwell reached its foot now, leading into a lanterned corridor, bright with randomly strewn fairytale lights. The walls, when she looked at them, were alive with the same computational shimmer she had seen on the surface. An impression of intense busyness; of unguessably complex machine algebra constantly churning just beyond her reach. 'What am I?' Khouri said. 'What are you? You said I was dead. I don't feel it. And I don't feel like I'm being simulated in any matrix. I was out on the surface, wasn't I?'

'You're flesh and blood,' Pascale said. 'You died, and you were recreated. Your body was reconstructed from the chemical elements already present in the matrix's outer crust, and then you were reanimated, and quickened to consciousness. The suit you're wearing -- that came from the matrix as well.'

'You mean someone wearing a suit got close enough to be killed by the tides?'

'No...' Pascale said carefully. 'No; there's another way into the matrix. A much easier way -- or at least it once was.'

'I should still be dead. Nothing can live on a neutron star. Or in it, for that matter.'

'I told you; it isn't one.' And then she explained how it was possible; how the matrix itself was generating a pocket of tolerable gravity in which she could live; how it was achieved by the circulation deeper in the crust of awesome quantities of degenerate matter; perhaps as a computational by-product; perhaps not. But like a diverging lens, the flow focused gravity away from her, while equally ferocious forces kept the walls from crushing in at only fractionally less than the speed of light.

'What about you?'

'I'm not like you,' Pascale said. 'This body I'm wearing -- that's all it is, something to puppet; something in which to meet you. It's formed from the same nuclear material as the crust. The neutrons are bound together by strange quarks, so I don't fly apart under my own quantum pressure.'

She touched her forehead. 'But I'm not doing any thinking. That's going on all around you, in the matrix itself. You'll excuse me -- and this is going to sound terribly rude -- but I'd find it mind- numbingly boring if I was forced into doing nothing except talk to you. As I said, our computational rates are highly divergent. You're not offended, are you? I mean, it's nothing personal, I hope you understand.'

'Forget it,' Khouri said. 'I'm sure I'd feel the same.'

The corridor widened out now, into what seemed to be a well-appointed scientific study, from any time in the last five or six centuries. The room's predominant colour was brown, the brown of age: on the wooden shelves which ran along its walls, on the browning spines of the ancient paper books arrayed along those shelves, the lustrous brown of the mahogany desk, and the golden-brown metal of the antique scientific tools placed around the desk's periphery for effect. Wooden cabinets buttressed the walls which did not carry shelves, and in them hung yellowing bones; alien bones which at first glance might be mistaken for the fossils of dinosaurs or large, extinct flightless birds, provided one did not pay undue attention to the capaciousness of the alien skull, the roominess of the mind it had surely once entrapped.

There were examples of modern apparatus too: scanning devices, advanced cutting instruments, racks of eidetics and holographic storage wafers. A servitor of intermediate modernity waited inertly in one corner, head slightly bowed, like a trusty retainer taking a well-earned snooze while still on his feet.

In one wall, slatted windows overlooked an arid, windswept terrain of mesas and precarious rock formations, bathed in the reddish light of a setting sun, already disappearing behind the chaotic horizon.

And at the desk -- rising from it as they entered the room, as if disturbed from concentration -- was Sylveste.

She looked into his eyes -- human eyes -- for the first time, in what passed for the flesh.

For a moment he looked annoyed by their intrusion, but his expression softened until half a smile played across his features. 'I'm glad you took the time to visit us,' he said. 'And I hope Pascale has explained all that you asked of her.'

'Most of it,' Khouri said, stepping further into the study, marvelling at the fastidiousness of its recreation. It was as good as any simulation she had ever experienced. Yet -- and the thought was as impressive as it was frightening -- every single object in this room was moulded from nuclear matter, at densities so large that, ordinarily, the smallest paperweight on his desk would have exerted a fatal gravitational pull, even from halfway across the room. 'But not all of it. How did you get here?'

'Pascale probably mentioned that there was another way into the matrix.' He offered her the palms of his hands. 'I found it, that's all. Passed through it.'

'And what happened to your...'

'My real self?' The smile had a quality of self-amusement now, as if he were enjoying some private joke too subtle to share. 'I doubt that he survived. And frankly, it doesn't really concern me.

I'm the real me now. I'm all that I ever was.'

'What happened in Cerberus?'

'That's a very long story, Khouri.'

But he told her anyway. How he had travelled into the world; how Sajaki's suit had turned out to be an empty shell; how that realisation had done nothing but strengthen his resolve to push on further, and what, finally, he had found, in the final chamber. How he had passed into the matrix -- at which point, his memories diverged from his other self. But when he told her he was sure that his other self was dead, he did so with such conviction that Khouri wondered if there was not another way of knowing; if some other, less tangible bond had linked them, right until the end.

There were things even Sylveste did not really understand; that much she sensed. He had not achieved godhead -- or at least, not for more than an instant, when he bathed in the portal. Had that been a choice he had made subsequently? she wondered. If the matrix was simulating him; and if the matrix was essentially infinite in its computational capacity... what limits had been imposed on him, other than those he had consciously selected?

What she learnt was this: Carine Lefevre had been kept alive by part of the Shroud, but there had been nothing accidental about it.

'It's as if there were two factions,' Sylveste said, toying with one of the brass microscopes on his desk, angling its little mirror this way and that, as if trying to catch the last rays of the setting sun.

'One that wanted to use me to find out if the Inhibitors were still around, still capable of posing a threat to the Shrouders. And the other faction, which I don't think cared for humanity any more than the first. But they were more cautious. They thought there had to be a better way, other than goading the Inhibitor device to see if it still generated a response.'

'But what happens to us now? Who actually won? Was it Sun Stealer or the Mademoiselle?'

'Neither,' Sylveste said, placing the microscope back down again, its velvet base softly bumping against the desk. 'At least, that's my instinctual feeling. I think we -- I -- came close to triggering the device, close to giving it the stimulus it needed to alert the remaining devices and begin the war against humanity.' He laughed. 'Calling it a war implied it might have been a two-sided thing. But I don't think it would have been like that at all.'

'But you don't think it got that far?'

'I hope and I pray, that's all.' He shrugged. 'Of course, I could be wrong. I used to say I was never wrong about anything, but that's one lesson I have learnt.'

'And what about the Amarantin, the Shrouders?'

'Only time will tell.'

'That's all?'

'I don't have all the answers, Khouri.' He looked around the room, as if appraising the volumes on the shelves, reassuring himself that they were still present. 'Not even here.'