‘It was never allowed,’ Mara said wistfully. ‘Only the commanders had access, on secure channels. I must say I found that hard. I don’t even know how she feels. Is she in pain? What does it feel like to be her now?’
‘How sad,’ Poole said. ‘You have your duty - to colonise a new world, the strange air of the black hole. But you can’t go there; instead you have to lose your children to it. You are transitional, belonging neither to your ancestors’ world or your children’s. You are stranded between worlds.’
That seemed to be too much for Mara. She sniffed, and pulled herself upright. ‘It was a military operation, you know. We all accepted it. I told you, we had our duty. But then the Kard’s ships came along,’ she said bitterly. ‘They just swept us up and took us away, and we didn’t even get to say goodbye.’
Tahget glared. ‘Which is why you hijacked my ship and dragged us all to the centre of the Galaxy!’
She smiled weakly. ‘I’m sorry about that.’
Futurity held his hands up. ‘I think what we need now is to find an exit strategy.’
Poole grinned. ‘At last you’re talking like an engineer, not a priest.’
Futurity said, ‘Mara, we’ve brought you here as we promised. You can see your daughter, I guess. What now? If we take you to the planetoid, would you be able to talk to her?’
‘Not likely,’ Mara said. ‘The Kardish troops were stealing the old Ideocracy gear even before we lifted off. I think they thought the whole project was somehow unhealthy.’
‘Yes,’ said Poole. ‘I can imagine they will use this as a propaganda tool in their battle with the Ideocracy.’
‘Pah,’ spat Tahget. ‘Never mind politics! What the acolyte is asking, madam, is whether you will now relinquish your bomb, so we can all get on with our lives.’
Mara looked up at the black hole, hesitating. ‘I don’t want to be any trouble.’
Tahget laughed bitterly.
‘I just wish I could speak to Sharn.’
‘If we can’t manage that, maybe we can send a message,’ said Michael Poole. He grinned, snapped his fingers, and disappeared.
And reappeared in his skinsuit, out in space, on the other side of the blister.
Captain Tahget raged, ‘How do you do that? After your last stunt I ordered your core processors to be locked down!’
‘Don’t blame your crew, Captain,’ came Poole’s muffled voice. ‘I hacked my way back in. After all, nobody knows me as well as I do. And I was once an engineer.’
Tahget clenched his fists uselessly. ‘Damn you, Poole, I ought to shut you down for good.’
‘Too late for that,’ Poole said cheerfully.
Futurity said, ‘Michael Poole, what are you going to do?’
Mara was the first to see it. ‘He’s going to follow Sharn. He’s going to download himself into the black hole air.’
Futurity stared at Poole. ‘Is she right?’
‘I’m going to try. Of course I’m making this up as I’m going along. My procedure is untested; it’s all or nothing.’
Tahget snorted. ‘You’re probably an even bigger fool than you were alive, Poole.’
‘Oh?’
‘All this is surmise. Even if it was the Ideocracy’s intention to seed the black hole with post-humans, we have no proof it worked. There may be nothing alive in those thin gases. And even if there is, it may no longer be human! Have you thought of that?’
‘Yes,’ Poole said. ‘Of course I have. But I always did like long odds. Quite an adventure, eh?’
Futurity couldn’t help but smile at his reckless optimism. But he stepped up to the window. ‘Michael Poole, please—’
‘What’s wrong, acolyte? Are you concerned about what your Hierocrat is going to do to you when you go home without his intellectual property?’
‘Well, yes. But I’m also concerned for you, Michael Poole.’
Poole did a double-take. ‘You are, aren’t you? I’m touched, Futurity’s Dream. I like you too, and I think you have a great future ahead of you - if you can clear the theological fog out of your head. You could change the world! But on the other hand, I have the feeling you’ll be a fine priest too. I’d like to stick around to see what happens. But, no offence, it ain’t worth going back into cold storage for.’
Mara said, her voice breaking, ‘If you find Sharn, tell her I love her.’
‘I will. And who knows? Perhaps we will find a way to get back in touch with you, some day. Don’t give up hope. I never do.’
‘I won’t.’
‘Just to be absolutely clear,’ said Captain Tahget heavily. ‘Mara, will this be enough for you to get rid of that damn bomb?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Mara. ‘I always did trust Michael Poole.’
‘And she won’t face any charges,’ Poole said. ‘Will she, Captain?’
Tahget looked at the ceiling. ‘As long as I get that bomb off my ship - and as long as somebody pays me for this jaunt - she can walk free.’
‘Then my work here is done,’ said Poole, mock-seriously. He turned and faced the black hole.
‘You’re hesitating,’ Futurity said.
‘Wouldn’t you? I wonder what the life expectancy of a sentient structure in there is … Well, I’ve got a century before the black hole hits Chandra, and maybe there’ll be a way to survive that.
‘I hope I live! It would be fun seeing what comes next, in this human Galaxy. For sure it won’t be like what went before. You know, it’s a dangerous precedent, this deliberate speciation: after an age of unity, will we now live through an era of bifurcation, as mankind purposefully splits and splits again?’ He turned back to Futurity and grinned. ‘And this is my own adventure, isn’t it, acolyte? Something the original Poole never shared. He’d probably be appalled, knowing him. I’m the black sheep! What was that about more real?’
Mara said, ‘I will be with you at Timelike Infinity, Michael Poole, when this burden will pass.’
That was a standard Wignerian prayer. Poole said gently, ‘Yes. Perhaps I’ll see you there, Mara. Who knows?’ He nodded to Futurity. ‘Goodbye, engineer. Remember - open mind.’
‘Open mind,’ Futurity said softly.
Poole turned, leapt away from the ship, and vanished in a shimmering of pixels.
After that, Futurity spent long hours studying the evanescent patterns in the air of the black hole. He tried to convince himself he could see more structure: new textures, a deeper richness. Perhaps Michael Poole really was in there, with Sharn. Or perhaps Michael Poole had already gone on to his next destination, or the next after that. It was impossible to tell.
He gave up, turned to his data desk, and began to work out how he was going to explain all this to the Hierocrat.
With the Shipbuilders swarming through their corridors and access tubes, the ship lifted out of the accretion disc of Chandra, and sailed for Base 478, and then for Earth.
In the end the Ideocracy and the Kardish Imperium inevitably fell on each other.
Such wars of succession consumed millennia and countless lives. It was not a noble age, though it threw up plenty of heroes.
But time exerted its power. The wars burned themselves out. Soon the Coalition with all its works and its legacies was forgotten.
As for the Wignerian religion, it developed into the mightiest and deepest of all mankind’s religions, and brought consolation to trillions. But in another moment it too was quite forgotten.
And humans, flung upon a million alien shores, morphed and adapted.
This was the Bifurcation of Mankind. How it would have horrified that dry old stick Hama Druz! There were still wars, of course. But now different human species confronted each other, and a fundamental xenophobia fuelled genocides.
As poor Rusel on the Mayflower II had understood, human destiny works itself out on overlapping timescales. An empire typically lasts a thousand years - the Coalition was a pathology. A religion may linger five or ten thousand years. Even a human subspecies will alter unrecognisably after fifty or a hundred thousand years. So on the longest of timescales human history is a complex dissonance, with notes sounding at a multitude of frequencies from the purposeful to the evolutionary, and only the broadest patterns are discernible in its fractal churning.
You learn this if you live long enough, like Rusel, like me.
The age of Bifurcation ended abruptly.
Sixty-five thousand years after the conquest of the Galaxy, genetic randomness threw up a new conqueror. Charismatic, monstrous, carelessly spending human life on a vast scale, the self-styled Unifier used one human type as a weapon against another, before one of his many enemies took his life, and his empire disintegrated, evanescent as all those before.
And yet the Unifier planted the seeds of a deeper unity. Not since the collapse of the Coalition had the successors of mankind recalled that their ancestors had shared the same warm pond. After ten thousand more years that unity found a common cause.
Mankind’s hard-won Galaxy was a mere tidal pool of muddy light, while all around alien cultures commanded a wider ocean. Now those immense spaces became an arena for a new war. As in the time of the Unifier, disparate human types were thrown into the conflict; new sub-species were even bred specifically to serve as weapons.
This war continued in various forms for a hundred thousand years. In the end, like the Unifier, mankind was defeated by the sheer scale of the arena - and by time, which erodes all human purposes.
But mankind didn’t return to complete fragmentation, not quite. For now a new force began to emerge in human politics.
The undying. Us. Me.
Since the time of Michael Poole, there had been undying among the ranks of mankind. Some of us were engineered to be so, and others were the children of the engineered. We emerged and died in our own slow generations, a subset of mankind.
The hostility of mortals was relentless. It pushed us together - even if, often, in mutual loathing. But we were always dependent on the mass of mankind. Undying or not, we were still human; we needed our short-lived cousins. We spent most of our long lives hiding, though.
We undying had rather enjoyed the long noon of the Coalition, for all that authority’s persecution of us. Stability and central control was what we sought above all else. To us the Coalition’s collapse, and the churning ages that followed, were a catastrophe.
When, two hundred thousand years after the time of Hama Druz, the storm of extragalactic war at last blew itself out, we decided enough was enough. We had always worked covertly, tweaking history here and there - as I had meddled in the destiny of the Exultants. Now it was different. In this moment of human fragmentation and weakness, we emerged from the shadows, and began to act.
We established a new centralising government called the Commonwealth. Slowly - so slowly most mayflies lived and died without ever seeing what we were doing - we strove to challenge time, to dam the flow of history. To gain control, at last.
And we attempted a deeper unity, a linking of minds called the Transcendence. This superhuman entity would envelop all of mankind in its joyous unity, reaching even deep into the past to redeem the benighted lives that had gone before. But the gulf between man and god proved too wide to bridge.
Half a million years after mankind first left Earth, the Transcendence proved the high water mark of humanity’s dreams.
When it fell our ultimate enemies closed in.
At first there was a period of stasis - the Long Calm, the historians called it. It lasted two hundred thousand years. The stasis was only comparative; human history resumed, with all its usual multiple-wavelength turbulence.
Then the stars began to go out.
It was the return of the Xeelee: mankind’s ultimate foe, superior, unforgiving, driven out of the home Galaxy but never defeated.
It had been thought the Xeelee were distracted by a war against a greater foe, creatures of dark matter called ‘photino birds‘ who were meddling with the evolution of the stars for their own purposes -
a
conflict exploited by Admiral Kard long ago to trigger the human-Xeelee war. The Xeelee were not distracted.
It had been thought the Xeelee had forgotten us. They had not forgotten.
We called the Xeelee’s vengeance the Scourge. It was a simple strategy: the stars that warmed human worlds were cloaked in an impenetrable shell of the Xeelee’s fabled ‘construction material’. It was even economical, for these cloaks were built out of the energy of the stars themselves. It was a technology that had actually been stumbled on long before by human migrants of the Second Expansion, then rediscovered by the Coalition’s Missionaries - discovered, even colonised, but never understood.
One by one, the worlds of man fell dark. Cruellest of all, when humanity had been driven out, the Xeelee unveiled the cleansed stars.
People had forgotten how to fight. They fled to the home Galaxy, and then fell back further to the spiral arms. But even there the scattered stars faded one by one.