"We expected nothing else." Marius bowed again and left the room.

Phelim let out a soft whistle of relief. "So that's it; we're just a trigger factor in their political wars."

Ethan tried to sound blase. "If it gets us what we want, I can live with it."

"I think you are wise not to rely on them exclusively. We must include our own drives in the construction program."

"Yes. The design teams have worked on that premise from the beginning." His secondary routines started to pull files from the storage lacunae in his macrocellular clusters. "In the meantime, let us begin with some simple appointments, shall we?"

Aaron walked across the red marble bridge that arched over Sisterhood Canal, which linked Golden Park with the Low Moat district. It contained a strip of simple paddock land that had no city buildings, only stockades for commercial animals and a couple of archaic markets. He strode along the meandering paths illuminated by small oil lanterns hanging from posts and on into the Ogden district. This was also grassland, but it contained the majority of the city's wooden-built stables where the aristocracy kept their horses and carriages. It was where the main city gate had been cut into the wall.

The gates were open wide when he went through, mingling with little groups of stragglers heading back to the urban expanse outside. Makkathran2 was surrounded by a two-mile-wide strip of parkland separating it from the vast modern metropolis that had sprung up around it over the last two centuries. Greater Makkathran2 now sprawled over four hundred square miles, an urban grid that contained sixteen million people, ninety-nine percent of whom were devout Living Dream followers. It was now the capital of Ellezelin, taking over from the original capital city of Riasi after the 3379 election had returned a Living Dream majority to the planetary senate.

There was no powered transport across the park: no ground taxis or underground train or even pedwalk strips. Of course, no capsule was allowed into Makkathran2's airspace. Inigo's thinking had been simple enough: The faithful would never mind walking the distance; that was what everyone did on Querencia. He wanted authenticity to be the governing factor in his movement's citadel. Riding across the park was permissible; Querencia had horses. Aaron smiled at that notion as he set off past the gates. Then an elusive memory flickered like a dying hologram. There was a time when he had clung to the neck of some giant horse as they galloped across an undulating terrain. The movement was powerful and rhythmic yet strangely leisurely. It was as if the horse were gliding rather than galloping, bounding forward. He knew exactly how to flow with it, grinning wildly as they raced onward, air blasting against his face, hair wild. An astonishingly deep sapphire sky was bright and warm above. The horse had a small, tough-looking horn at the top of its forehead, tipped with the traditional black metal spike.

Aaron grunted dismissively. It must have been some sensory immersion drama he had accessed on the unisphere. Not real.

The midpoint of the park was a uniform ridge. When Aaron reached the crest, it was as though he were stepping across a rift in time. Behind him the quaintly archaic profile of Makkathran2 bathed in its alien orange glow; in front were the modernistic block towers and neat district grids, producing a multicolored haze that stretched over the horizon. Regrav capsules slipped effortlessly through the air above it in strictly maintained traffic streams, long horizontal bands of fast motion winding up at cycloidal junctions that knitted the city together in a pulsing kinetic dance. In the southeastern sky he could see the brighter lights of starships as they slipped in and out of the atmosphere far above the spaceport. A never-ending procession of big cargo craft provided the city with economic bonds to planets outside the reach of the official Free Market Zone wormholes.

When he reached the outer rim of the park, he told his u-shadow to call a taxi. A glossy jade-colored regrav capsule dropped silently out of the traffic swarm above and dilated its door. Aaron settled on the front bench, where he had a good view through the one-way fuselage.

"Hotel Buckingham."

He frowned as the capsule dived back up into the broad stream circling around the dark expanse of park. Had that instruction come from him or his u-shadow?

At the first junction they whipped around and headed deeper into the urban grid. The tree-lined boulevards a regulation hundred meters below actually had a few ground cars driving along the concrete. People rode horses among them. Bicycles were popular. He shook his head in bemusement.

The Hotel Buckingham was a thirty-story pentagon ribbed with balconies, sharp pinnacles soaring up out of each corner. It glowed a lambent pearl-white except for its hundreds of windows, which were black recesses. The roof was a small strip of lush jungle. Tiny lights glimmered among the foliage as patrons dined and danced in the open air.

Aaron's taxi dropped him at the arrivals pad in the center. He had a credit coin in his pocket that activated to his DNA and paid for the ride. There was a credit code loaded in a macrocellular storage lacuna that he could have used, but the coin made the ride harder to trace. Not impossible by any means, just out of reach of the ordinary citizen. As the taxi took off, he glanced up at the tall monochromatic walls fencing him in, feeling unnervingly exposed.

"Am I registered here?" he asked his u-shadow.

"Yes. Room 3088. A penthouse suite."

"I see." He turned and looked directly at the penthouse's balcony. He'd known its location automatically. "And can I afford that?"

"Yes. The penthouse costs fifteen hundred Ellezelin pounds per night. Your credit coin has a limit of five million Ellezelin pounds a month."

"A month?"

"Yes."

"Paid by whom?"

"The coin is supported by a Central Augusta Bank account. The account details are secure."

"And my personal credit code?"

"The same."

Aaron walked into the lobby. "Nice to be rich," he told himself.

The penthouse had five rooms and a small private swimming pool. As soon as Aaron walked into the main lounge, he checked himself out in the mirror. He had a face older than the norm, approaching thirty, possessing short black hair and, oddly, eyes with a hint of purple in their gray irises. Slightly Oriental features, but with skin that was rough and a dark stubble shadow.

Yep, that's me.

The instinctive response was reassuring but still did not give any clues to his identity.

He settled into a broad armchair that faced an external window and turned down the opacity to stare out across the nighttime city toward the invisible heart Inigo had built. There was a lot of information in those mock-alien structures that would help him find his quarry. It was not the kind of data stored in electronic files; if it were that easy, Inigo would have been found by now. No, the information he needed was personal; which brought some unique access problems for someone like him, an unbeliever.

He ordered room service. The hotel was pretentious enough to employ human chefs. When the food arrived, he could appreciate the subtleties of its preparation; there was a definite difference from culinary unit produce. He sat in the big chair, watching the city as he ate. Any route to the senior Clerics and Councillors would not be easy, he realized. But then, this Pilgrimage had presented him with a unique opportunity. If they were going to fly into the Void, they would need ships. That gave him an easy enough cover. It left just the problem of who to try to cultivate.

His u-shadow produced an extensive list of senior Clerics, providing him with gossip about who was allied with Ethan and who, post-election, was going to be scrubbing Council toilets for the next few decades.

It took him half the night, but the name was there. It was even featured on the city news web as Ethan began reorganizing Living Dream's hierarchy to suit his own policy. Not obvious, but it had a lot of potential: Corrie-Lyn.

The courier case arrived at Troblum's apartment an hour before he was due to make his presentation to the navy review panel. He wrapped a cloak around himself and walked out to the glass elevator in the lobby as the emerald fabric adjusted itself to his bulk. Ancient mechanical systems whirred and clanked as the elevator slid smoothly downward. They were not totally original, of course; technically, the whole building dated back over 1,350 years. During that time there had been a lot of refurbishment and restoration work. Then, five hundred years ago, a stabilizer field generator had been installed, which maintained the molecular bonds inside all the antique bricks, girders, and composite sheets comprising the main body of the building. Essentially, as long as there was power for the generator, entropy was held at arm's length.

Troblum had managed to acquire custodianship over a hundred years earlier, following a somewhat obsessional twenty-seven-year campaign. Nobody owned property on Arevalo anymore; it was a Higher world, part of the Central Commonwealth-back when the building had been put up, they had called it phase one space. Persuading the previous tenants to leave had taken all his energy and mass allocation for years, as well as his meager social skills. He had used mediator Councillors, lawyers, and historical restitution experts, even launching an appeal against the Daroca City Council, which managed the stabilizer generator. During the campaign he had acquired an unexpected ally that probably had helped swing the whole thing in his favor. Whatever the means, the outcome was that he now had undisputed occupancy rights for the whole building. No one else lived in it, and very few had been invited in.

The elevator stopped at the entrance hall. Troblum walked past the empty concierge desk to the tall door made of stained glass. Outside, the courier case was hovering a meter and a half above the pavement, a dull metal box with transport certificates glowing pink on one end, shielded against field scans. His u-shadow confirmed the contents and directed it into the hall, where it landed on his cart. The base opened and deposited the package: a fat silvered cylinder half a meter long. Troblum kept the door open until the case departed, then closed it. Privacy shielding came up around the entrance hall, and he walked back into the elevator. The cart followed obediently.

Originally, the building had been a factory, and each of the five floors had a very tall ceiling. Then, as was the way of things in those early days of the Commonwealth, the city had expanded and prospered, pushing industry out of the old center. The factory had been converted into high-class apartments. One of the two penthouse loft apartments that took up the entire fifth floor had been purchased by the Halgarth Dynasty as part of its massive property portfolio on Arevalo. The other apartments had all been restored to a reasonable approximation of their 2380 layout and decor, but Troblum had concentrated his formidable energies on the Halgarth one, where he now lived.

In order to get it as near perfect as possible he had extracted both architect and interior designer plans from the city's deep archive. Those plans had been complemented by some equally ancient visual recordings from the Michelangelo news show of that era. But his main source of detail had been the forensic scans from the Serious Crimes Directorate that he had obtained directly from ANA. After combining the data, he had spent five years painstakingly recrafting the extravagant vintage decor, the end result of which had given him three en suite bedrooms and a large open-plan lounge that was separated from a kitchen section by a marble-topped breakfast bar. A window wall had a balcony on the other side, providing a grand view out across the Caspe River.

When the City Council's historical maintenance officer made her final review of the project, she was delighted with the outcome, but the reason for Troblum's dedication completely eluded her. He had expected nothing else; her field was the building itself. What had gone on inside at the time of the Starflyer War was his area of expertise. He would never use the word "obsession," but that whole episode had become a lot more than a hobby to him. He was determined that one day he would publish the definitive history of the war.

The penthouse door opened for him. Solidos of the three girls were sitting on the blue leather settee by the window wall. Catriona Saleeb was dressed in a red and gold robe, its belt tied loosely so that her silk underwear was visible. Long curly black hair tumbled chaotically over her shoulders as she tossed her head. She was the smallest of the three, the solido's animation software holding her image as that of a bubbly twenty-one-year-old, carefree and eager. Leaning up against her, sipping tea from a big cup, was Trisha Marina Halgarth. Her dark heart-shaped face had small dark green butterfly wing OC-tattoos flowing back from each hazel eye, the antique technology undulating slowly in response to each facial motion. Sitting just apart from the other two was Isabella Halgarth. She was a tall blonde, with long straight hair gathered into a single tail. The fluffy white sweater she wore was a great deal more tantalizing that it strictly ought to have been, riding high above her midriff, and her jeans were little more than an outer layer of blue skin running down long athletic legs. Her face had high cheekbones, giving her an aristocratic appearance that was backed up with an attitude of cool disdain. While her two friends called out eager hellos to Troblum, she merely acknowledged him with a simple nod.

With a regretful sigh, Troblum told his u-shadow to isolate the girls. They had been his companions for fifty years, and he enjoyed their company a great deal more than that of any real human. And they helped anchor him in the era he so loved. Unfortunately, he could not afford distractions right now, however delightful. It had taken him decades to refine the animation programs and bestow a valid I-sentient personality on each solido. The three of them had shared the apartment during the Starflyer War, becoming involved in a famous disinformation sting run by the Starflyer. Isabella herself had been one of the alien's most effective agents inside the Commonwealth, seducing high-ranking politicians and officials and subtly manipulating them. For a while after the war, to be "Isabella-ed" was a Commonwealth-wide phrase meaning to be screwed over, but that infamy had faded eventually. Even among people who routinely lived for over five hundred years, events lost their potency and relevance. Today the Starflyer War was simply one of those formative incidents at the start of the Commonwealth, like Ozzie and Nigel, the Hive, the Endeavor's circumnavigation, and cracking the Planters' nanotech. When he was younger, Troblum certainly had not been interested; then, purely by chance, he had discovered that he was descended from someone called Mark Vernon who apparently had played a vital role in the war. He had started to research his ancestor casually, wanting nothing more than a few details, to learn a little chunk of family background. That was a hundred eighty years ago, and he was as fascinated by the whole Starflyer War now as he had been when he had opened those first files on the period.

The girls turned away from Troblum and the cart that had followed him in, chattering brightly among themselves. He looked down at the cylinder as it turned transparent. Inside, it contained a strut of metal a hundred fifteen centimeters long; at one end there was a node of plastic where the frayed ends of fiber-optic cable stuck out like a straggly tail. The surface was tarnished and pocked; it was also kinked in the middle, as if something had struck it. Troblum unlocked the end of the cylinder, ignoring the hiss of gas as the protective argon spilled out. There was nothing he could do to stop his hands from trembling as he slid the strut out, nor was there anything to be done about his throat muscles tightening. Then he was holding the strut up, actually witnessing the texture of its worn surface against his skin. He smiled down on it the way a Natural man would regard his newborn child. Subcutaneous sensors enriching his fingers combined with his Higher field scan function to run a detailed analysis. The strut was an aluminium-titanium alloy with a specific hydrocarbon chain reinforcement; it was also 2,400 years old. He was holding in his own hands a piece of the Marie Celeste, the Starflyer's ship.

After a long moment he put the strut back into the cylinder and ran the atmospheric purge, resealing it in argon. He would never hold it physically again; it was too precious for that. It would go into the other apartment, where he kept his collection of memorabilia. A small stabilizer field generator would maintain its molecular structure down the centuries, as was fitting.

Troblum acknowledged the authenticity of the strut and authorized his quasi-legal bank account on Wessex to pay the final instalment to the black-market supplier on Far Away who had acquired the item for him. It wasn't that having cash funds was illegal for a Higher. Higher culture was based on the tenet of individuals being mature and intelligent enough to accept responsibility for themselves and to act within the agreed parameters of societal norms. "I am government" was the culture's fundamental political kernel. However, quiet methods of converting a Higher citizen's energy and mass allocation (EMA), the so-called Central Dollar, to actual hard cash acceptable on the External worlds were well established for those who felt they needed such an option. EMA didn't qualify as money in the traditional sense; it was simply a way of regulating Higher citizen activity, preventing excessive or unreasonable demands being placed on communal resources, of whatever nature, by an individual.

As the cart headed back out of the apartment, Troblum hurried to his bedroom. He barely had time to shower and put on a toga suit before he had to leave. The glass elevator took him down to the basement garage where his regrav capsule was parked. It was an old model, dating back two centuries, a worn chrome-purple in color and longer than modern versions, with the forward bodywork stretching out like the nose cone of some External world aircraft. He clambered in, taking up over half of a front bench that was designed to hold three people. The capsule glided out of the garage and tipped up to join the traffic stream overhead.

The center of Daroca was a pleasing blend of modern structures with their smooth pinnacle geometries, pretty or substantial historical buildings like Troblum's, and the original ample mosaic of parkland that the founding council had laid out. Airborne traffic streams broadly followed the pattern of ancient thoroughfares. Troblum's capsule flew northward under the planet's bronze sunlight, heading out over the newer districts where the buildings were spaced farther apart and big individual houses were in the majority.

Low in the western sky he could just make out the bright star that was Air. It was the project that had attracted him to Arevalo in the first place: an attempt to construct an artificial space habitat the size of a gas giant planet. After two centuries of effort the project governors had built nearly eighty percent of the spherical geodesic lattice that would act as both the conductor and the generator of a single encapsulating force field. Once it was powered up, siphoning energy directly from the star via a zero-width wormhole, the interior would be filled with a standard oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere harvested from the system's outer moons and gas giants. After that, various biological components, both animal and botanical, would be introduced, floating around inside to establish a biosphere life cycle. The end result, a zero-G environment with a diameter greater than that of Saturn, would give people the ultimate freedom to fly free, adding an extraordinary new dimension to the whole human experience.

Critics, of whom there were many, claimed it was a poor and pointless copy of the Silfen Motherholme that Ozzie had discovered, an entire star wrapped by a breathable atmosphere. Proponents argued that it was just a stepping-stone, an important, inspiring testament that would expand the ability and outlook of Higher culture. Their rationale won them a hard-fought Central worlds referendum to obtain the EMAs they needed to complete the project.

Troblum, who was first and foremost a physicist, had been attracted to Air by just that rationalization. He had spent a constructive seventy years working to translate theoretical concepts into physical reality, helping to build the force field generators that studded the geodesic lattice. At that point his preoccupation with the Starflyer War had taken over, and he had gained the attention of people running an altogether more interesting construction project. They made him an offer he couldn't refuse. It often comforted him how that episode of his life mirrored one from the life of his illustrious ancestor, Mark.

His capsule descended into the compound of the Commonwealth Navy office. It consisted of a spaceport field lined by two rows of big hangars and maintenance bays. Arevalo was primarily a base for the navy's exploration division. The starships sitting on the field were either long-range research vessels or more standard passenger craft; the three matte-black towers looming along the northern perimeter housed the astrophysics laboratories and scientific crew training facilities. Troblum's capsule drifted through the splayed arches on which the main tower stood and landed directly underneath it. He walked over to the base of the nearest arch column, toga suit surrounding him in a garish ultraviolet aurora. There were not many people about: a few officers on their way to regrav capsules. His appearance drew glances; for a Higher to be so big was very unusual. Biononics usually kept a body trim and healthy; it was their primary function. There were a few cases in which a slightly unusual biochemical makeup presented operational difficulties for biononics, but that normally was remedied by a small chromosome modification. Troblum refused to consider it. He was what he was and did not see the need to apologize for it to anyone in any fashion.

Even the short distance from the capsule to the column made his heart race. He was sweating when he went into the empty vestibule at the base of the column. Deep sensors scanned him, and he put his hand on a tester globe, allowing the security system to confirm his DNA. One of the elevators opened. It descended for an unnerving amount of time.

The heavily shielded conference room reserved for his presentation was unremarkable: an oval chamber with an oval rockwood table in the middle, ten pearl-white shaper chairs with high backs arranged around it. Troblum took the one opposite the door and started running checks with the navy office net to make sure all the files he needed were loaded properly.

Four navy officers walked in, three of them in identical toga suits whose ebony surface effect rippled in subdued patterns. Their seniority was evidenced only by small red dots glowing on their shoulders. He recognized all of them without having to reference their u-shadows: Mykala, a third-level captain and the local faster-than-light (FTL) drive bureau director; Eoin, a captain who specialized in alien activities; and Yehudi, the Arevalo office commander. Accompanying them was First Admiral Kazimir Burnelli. Troblum had not been expecting him; the shock of seeing the commander of the Commonwealth Navy in person made him stand up quickly. It wasn't just his position that was fascinating. The Admiral was the child of two very important figures from the Starflyer War and famous for a man his age: 1,206 years old, seven or eight centuries past the time most Highers downloaded themselves into ANA.

The Admiral wore a black uniform of stylishly cut old-fashioned cloth. It suited him perfectly, emphasizing broad shoulders and a lean torso, the classic authority figure. He was tall with olive skin and a handsome face. Troblum recognized some of his father's characteristics-the blunt jaw and jet-black hair-but his mother's finer features were there also: a nose that was almost dainty and pale friendly eyes.

"Admiral!" Troblum exclaimed.

"Pleased to meet you." Kazimir Burnelli extended a hand.

It took Troblum a moment before he realized what to do and put out his own hand to shake, suddenly very pleased that his toga suit had a cooling web and that he no longer was sweating. The social formality file his u-shadow had pushed into his exovision was withdrawn abruptly.

"I'll be representing ANA: Governance for this presentation," Kazimir said. Troblum had guessed as much. Kazimir Burnelli was the essential human link in the chain between ANA: Governance and the ships of the navy deterrent fleet, a position of trust and responsibility he had held for over eight hundred years. Something in the way he carried himself was indicative of all those centuries he had lived, an aura of weariness that anyone in his presence couldn't help being aware of.

There were so many things Troblum was desperate to ask, starting with: Have you stayed in your body so long because your father's life was so short? And possibly: Can you get me access to your grandfather? But instead he meekly said: "Thank you for coming, Admiral." Another privacy shield came on around the chamber, and the net confirmed that they were grade-one secure.

"So what have you got for us?" the Admiral asked.

"A theory on the Dyson Pair generators," Troblum said. He activated the chamber's web node so that the others could share the data and projections in his files and began to explain.

The Dyson Pair were stars three light-years apart that were confined within giant force fields. The barriers had been established in AD1200 by the Anomine for good reason: to contain the Prime aliens, who already had spread from their homeworld around Alpha to Beta and were pathologically hostile to all biological life except their own. The Starflyer, a Prime that had escaped imprisonment, had manipulated the Commonwealth into opening the force field around Dyson Alpha, resulting in a war that killed in excess of fifty million humans. The navy had kept an unbroken watch on the stars ever since.

Centuries later, when the Raiel invited the Commonwealth to join the Void observation project at Centurion Station, human scientists had been startled by the similarity between the planet-sized defense systems deployed throughout the Wall stars and the generators that produced the Dyson Pair force fields.

Until now, Troblum said, everyone assumed the Anomine had a technology base equal to that of the Raiel. He disputed that. His analysis of the Dyson Pair generators showed they were almost identical in concept to the Centurion Station DF machines.

"Which proves the point, surely?" Yehudi said.

"Quite the opposite," Troblum replied smoothly.

The Anomine homeworld had been visited several times by the navy's exploration division. As a species they had divided two millennia earlier. The most technologically advanced group had elevated to postphysical sentience, and the remainder had retroevolved to a simple pastoral culture. Although they had developed wormholes and sent exploration ships ranging across the galaxy, they had settled only a dozen or so nearby star systems, none of which had massive astroengineering facilities. The remaining pastoral societies had no knowledge of the Dyson Pair generators, and the postphysicals had long since withdrawn from contact with their distant cousins. An extensive search of the sector by successive navy ships had failed to locate the assembly structure for the Dyson Pair generators. Until now human astro-archaeologists had assumed that the abandoned machinery had decayed into the vacuum or was simply lost.

Given the colossal scale involved, Troblum said, neither was truly believable. First, however sophisticated they were, it would have taken the Anomine at least a century to build such a generator from scratch, let alone two of them. Look how long it was taking Highers to construct Air, and that was with nearly unlimited EMAs. Second, the generators had been needed quickly. The Prime aliens of Dyson Alpha already were building slower-than-light starships, which was why the Anomine sealed them in. If there had been a century gap while the Anomine beavered away at construction, the Primes would have expanded out to every star within a fifty-light-year radius before the generators were finished.

"The obvious conclusion," Troblum said, "is that the Anomine simply appropriated existing Raiel systems from the Wall. All they would need for that would be a scaled-up wormhole generator to transport them to the Dyson Pair, and we know they already possessed the basic technology. What I would like is for the navy to start a detailed search of interstellar space around the Dyson Pair. The Anomine wormhole drive or drives could conceivably still be there, especially if it was a 'one shot' device." He gave the Admiral an expectant look.

Kazimir Burnelli paused as the last of Troblum's files closed. "The Primes built the largest wormhole ever known in order to invade the Commonwealth across five hundred light-years," he said.

"It was called Hell's Gateway," Troblum said automatically.

"You do know your history. Good. Then you should also know it was only a couple of kilometers in diameter. Hardly enough to transport the barrier generators."

"Yes, but I'm talking about a completely new manifestation of wormhole drive technology. A wormhole that doesn't need a correspondingly large generator; you simply project the exotic matter effect to the size required."

"I've never heard of anything like that."

"It can be achieved easily within our understanding of wormhole theory, Admiral."

"Easily?" Kazimir Burnelli turned to Mykala. "Captain?"

"I suppose it may be possible," Mykala said. "I'd need to reexamine exotic matter theory before I could say one way or another."

"I'm already working on a method," Troblum blurted.

"Any success?" Mykala queried.

Troblum suspected she was being derisive but lacked the skill to interpret her tone. "I'm progressing, yes. There's certainly no theoretical block to diameter. It's all a matter of the amount of energy available."

"To ship a Dyson barrier generator halfway across the galaxy you'd need a nova," Mykala said.

Now Troblum was sure she was mocking him. "It needs nothing like that much energy," he said. "In any case, if they built the generators on or near their home star, they would still have needed a transport system, wouldn't they? If they built them in situ, which is very doubtful, where is the construction site? We'd have found something that big by now. Those generators were moved from wherever the Raiel had originally installed them."

"Unless it was produced by their postphysicals," she said. "Who knows what abilities they have or had."

"Sorry, I'm going to have to go with Troblum on that one," Eoin said. "We know the Anomine didn't elevate to postphysical status until after the Dyson barriers were established approximately a hundred and fifty years later."

"Exactly," Troblum said triumphantly. "They had to be using a level of technology effectively equal to ours. Somewhere out there in interstellar space is an abandoned drive system capable of moving objects the size of planets. We need to find it, Admiral. I've already compiled a search methodology using current navy exploration craft which I'd like-"

"Let me just stop you there," Kazimir Burnelli said. "Troblum, what you've given us so far is a very convincing hypothesis. So much so that I'm going to immediately forward your data to a senior department review committee. If they give me a positive verdict, you and I will discuss the navy's investigation options. And believe me, for this day and age, that's being fast-tracked, okay?"

"But you can sanction the exploration division to begin the search right away; you have that authority."

"I do, yes, but I don't exercise it without a good reason. What you've shown us is more than sufficient to start a serious appraisal. We will follow due process. Then, if you're right-"

"Of course I'm fucking right," Troblum snapped. He knew that he was acting inappropriately, but his goal was so close. He had assumed that the Admiral's unexpected appearance that day meant the search could begin right away. "I don't have the EMAs for that many starships myself; that's why the navy has to be involved."

"There would never be an opportunity for an individual to perform a search," Kazimir replied lightly. "Space around the Dyson Pair remains restricted. This is a navy project."

"Yes, Admiral," Troblum mumbled. "I understand." Which he did. But that didn't quell his resentment at the bureaucracy involved.

"I notice you haven't included your results on this 'one shot' wormhole drive idea," Mykala said. "That's a big hole in the proposal."

"It's at an early stage," Troblum said, which was not quite true. He had held back on his project precisely because he was so close to success. It was going to be the clinching argument if the presentation did not go well, which in a way it hadn't. But..."I hope to be giving you some positive results soon."

"That I will be very interested in," Kazimir said, finally producing a smile that lifted centuries away from him. "Thank you for bringing this to us. And I do genuinely appreciate the effort involved."

"It's what I do," Troblum said gruffly. He kept silent as the shielding switched off and the others left the chamber. What he wanted to shout after the Admiral was: Your mother made her decisions without any committee to hold her hand, and as for what your grandfather would say about getting a consensus... Instead he let out a disgruntled breath as he sealed the files back into his storage lacuna. Meeting an idol was always such a risk; so few of them ever lived up to their own legends.

The Delivery Man was woken by his youngest daughter just as a chilly dawn light was rising outside. Little Rosa once again had decided that five hours of sleep was quite sufficient for her; now she was sitting up in her crib wailing for attention. And milk. Beside him, Lizzie was just starting to stir out of a deep sleep. Before she could wake, he swung himself out of bed and hurried along the landing to the nursery. If he wasn't quick enough, Tilly and Elsie would be woken up, and then nobody would get any peace.

The pediatric housebot floated through the nursery door after him, a simple ovoid just over a meter high. It extruded Rosa's milk bulb through its neutral gray skin. Both he and his wife, Lizzie, hated the idea of a machine, even one as sophisticated as the housebot, caring for the child, so he settled her on his lap in the big chair at the side of the crib and started feeding her out of the bulb. Rosa smiled adoringly around the nozzle and squirmed deeper into his embrace. The housebot extended a hose that attached to the outlet patch on her sleepsuit's diaper and siphoned away the night's wee. Rosa waved contentedly at the housebot as it glided out of the nursery.

"Goobi," she cooed, and resumed drinking.

"Goodbye," the Delivery Man corrected her. At seventeen months, Rosa had a vocabulary that was just starting to develop. The biononic organelles in her cells were effectively inactive other than reproducing themselves to supplement her new cells as she grew. Extensive research had shown that it was best for a Higher-born human to follow nature's original development schedule until about puberty. After that the biononics could be used as intended; one of their functions was to modify the body however the host wanted. He still wasn't sure that was such a good idea; handing teenagers unrestrained power over their own physiology frequently led to serious self-inflicted blunders. He always remembered the time when he was fourteen and had a terrible crush on a seventeen-year-old girl. He had tried to "improve" his genitals. It had taken five hugely embarrassing trips to a biononic procedures doctor to sort out the painful abnormal growths.