‘You’re welcome.’ She ran a hand through her short greying hair. ‘A conference in freezin’ fuckin’ Montreal. I thought this weekend was going to be boring.’

  ‘It’s not that cold yet,’ said Kian. ‘And thank you very much.’

  ‘You’re welcome, pal. My name’s Kat.’

  She held out her hand, unperturbed by the ruined claw Kian offered in return.

  ‘I’m Kian.’

  ‘Mmm. Interesting eyes you’ve got.’

  They married the following spring.

  She was Katerina Hinton, Dr Kat to her large and boisterous clan of Iowa wrestlers and cow farmers. When Kian stayed with one of the cousins or aunts or uncles, they made no allowance for his privileged status or physical condition; he did chores with the rest of them. No-one cared about the age difference between him and Kat; and they took it for granted that Kat would teach him to milk cows.

  During the long walks around the fields, she would also show him the beetles that rolled away the dung - ‘Or we’d be buried in cow-flap. Not just here, I mean the entire state’ - and other glimpses of ecology’s complexities, such as mites that saved human houses from being inundated with shed skin cells.

  ‘Deirdre can write the coupling equations,’ Kian said once. ‘But you bring it to life, dear.’

  ‘Yeah? I’ll show you coupling.’

  In bed, they laughed a lot.

  At social events, they were K’n’K, or Two K. And they had a social life (not just with Kat’s faculty colleagues at Iowa State) as Kian dropped his mu-space missions back to the minimum. UNSA, careful to show how they looked after this generation of Pilots as they matured, were more helpful than expected.

  ‘Probably knew they’d have to answer to me,’ said Kat.

  For reasons they never discussed with anyone else, Kian and Kat bore no biological children of their own. But they adopted a Eurasian girl called Maria, and furnished her with all the love they were capable of, which was a great deal.

  One night, when Maria was fifteen, she came home from college very late, scratched and bruised. She was shaking, but neither too embarrassed nor too angry to explain how the boys she was with had drunk too much (she was not entirely innocent in that) and tried to go way too far.

  Kian went to visit them in hospital.

  He never repeated what he had told them, but they and their families became very quiet in the community during the final months before they packed their belongings and moved out of state.

  When Maria was twenty-five, she consulted with UNSA as part of a team designing terraformer bacteria. The first full-scale trials were scheduled for a new world, nameless as yet, where the surface was uninhabitable but the geology encouraged the use of nanobores to drill out subterranean homes for the first batch of colonists.

  With an eye to the future, the colonial team included half a dozen memetic engineers. The ship’s cargo manifest, on the same mission that carried the first test samples from Maria’s project, included a hardcopy of Sequencing the Memome. Deirdre, when Maria told her, was both pleased and mad. ‘Pissed off and proud,’ she said. ‘The first time I’ve understood quantum superposition in my gut. Those bastards.’

  By the time Maria was thirty-two, she was Dean of Iowa State. Despite her administrative duties, she used her authority to bully her way back into eco-research - ‘Because politics bores the piss out of me’ - while acting as assistant wrestling coach.

  During the final semester that year, she organized Kat’s retirement party.

  One cool evening at the end of May 2207, Kat told Kian she was dying.

  They were sitting on the deck behind their cottage, looking out across the body of water that Kian called a lake and Kat referred to as The Pond. Tiny flies danced upon the surface. Kat put down her glass of iced tea, then pointed at a flat stone stained with pale grey-green patches.

  ‘What do you see, Kian?’

  ‘Life, of course, my love.’

  She had taught him how to look. How to see the miracle of life where others would notice only discoloration.

  ‘Anything more complex than a bacterium,’ Kat said, ‘eventually breaks down.’

  After a long moment Kian took her hand.

  ‘It’s the bacterium’s loss. Never knowing love.’

  Kat smiled. She kept hold of his hand as they watched the sun go down.

  Six weeks later she was dead.

  After the burial, family and friends accompanied Kian back to the cottage. From a rear window he looked out at The Pond, and silently sipped a white wine that Kat had bought when they were in Paris the year before.

  ‘I love you, Dad,’ said Maria.

  ‘You’re the best daughter we could have had. And Kat...’

  ‘Was the best Mom in all possible worlds.’

  Behind them, Paula and Deirdre looked at each other and blinked.

  ‘She showed me how wonderful this world is.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But she didn’t realize ... She was the best part of it. The magic that was everywhere.’

  Deirdre shivered. Paula bit her lip.

  They had known Kian long enough to sense when his words held multiple layers of meaning.

  Surrounded by forest, some twenty miles from Portland, Oregon, stood an UNSA flight base with an enviable reputation within the organization. Although engineering protocols and training programmes were standardized across the globe, it was inevitable that local variations would creep in, and that some facilities would become better than others.

  Enclosed in Hangar 7, in the middle of the base, a bronze, purple-banded ship, fresh from its latest service, waited.

  There were armed guards at the perimeter and drones hovering overhead, scanning visible and infra-red wavelengths. That remained standard procedure at UNSA bases, though anti-xeno protest was a thing of the past.

  On the fourth of July, two nights after the pallbearers lowered Kat McNamara (nee Hinton) into the ground, celebratory fireworks exploded in the sky over Portland, joined by the more modest efforts of outlying communities.

  And on the morning of the fifth, an engineer called Eddie Eisberg was the first person to enter Hangar 7, despite the hangover which thickened his head. It took him a full two minutes to work out the situation and press the big red alarm button.

  The sound echoed through the empty hangar.

  The Life and Times of Kian McNamara was one of thirteen extensive biographies, and the only one to which Maria gave approval. She even had hardcopies on a shelf in her office, mounted between two antique long-barrelled Colt .45s she somehow hung on to after firearm ownership became punishable by hypnotrauma.

  No-one has seen Kian McNamara, the second Admiral, read the final paragraph, since that fateful July night in 2207. No-one on Terra. But who can tell what mysteries await in the fractal universe that is mu-space?

  ‘The whole thing is fifty per cent cowshit,’ she told the young author. ‘But that’s forty per cent better than the rest of the field. Those bastard newsNet articles rate ninety-eight per cent crap on my turdometer.’

  Her only answer was a sickly smile.

  She got that a lot.

  ‘Your genes have died out, Dad,’ she told Kian’s portrait once, when she was pregnant with her second child, ‘but so fuckin’ what?’

  Every natural-born Pilot inherited fractolons from Ro McNamara, or rather the femto-engineered self-replicating molecule called FZA that coded for those organelles, just as they inherited mitochondrial DNA from their genetic mothers. So perhaps some paragenetic echo of her father remained.

  The father of both David and Deirdre (named after her nominal aunt) was Rorion Delgasso. Rorion’s father Carlos had been a pain to the McNamaras, back when Kian and Dirk were young - at school, Carlos had hero-worshipped the twins. But after Kian’s disappearance it was Carlos Delgasso who became the third Admiral.

  Like every other Pilot’s mother, Maria gave birth aboard ship in mu-space, her mind in delta-coma to save her sanity, while machines induced labour and stood ready to perform a caesarian should it be necessary. For Maria, the need did not arise on either occasion.

  ‘Just popped out,’ she would tell her friends. ‘Go to sleep with a bump in your belly, wake up with a mewling jet-eyed kid. Nothing to it.’

  Rorion was a good father when he was on Terra. Living with Maria was never part of the arrangement.

  Once the kids had graduated, Maria made several mu-space voyages of her own, including some that were deliberately planned to take advantage of relativistic effects, so that she would return from a six-month (subjective) research trip a full decade after leaving.

  It suited her, or so she told herself.

  It meant that Maria observed geopolitics through a series of unfocused snapshots. She realized that UNSA was feeling the strain, that the third United Nations was finally pulling apart under its own momentum. That, and the growth of sociopolitical clades that crossed geographical boundaries while maintaining all of the bad features that had plagued nation states since they were invented in the nineteenth (or maybe eighteenth) century.

  On returning from her final voyage, Maria learned that UNSA existed only as the skeletal remains of that once-powerful organization. The Pilots, self-sufficient and with new vessels that came from who-knew-where, were dealing directly with trade consortia.

  Maria sat on the grey wooden dock behind the old family cottage. She was not old - did not feel old - but on Terra ninety-four years had elapsed since Kat died and Kian abandoned realspace. (It was also one hundred and thirty-five years since Kian’s brother Dirk spectacularly stole a ship and disappeared, but she did not remember that.) Maria’s two children were somewhere among the stars.

  ‘Cowshit,’ she told the bottle of Laphroaig in her left hand. ‘One hundred per cent cowshit.’

  With her right hand, Maria placed the muzzle of a very old and valuable Colt .45 against her temple. Because of the weight and the long barrel, she found it easier to hold the weapon in reverse, with all four fingers curled around the butt, her thumb inside the trigger.

  ‘Hundred per cent…’

  And squeezed.

  The next day, 12 July 2301, the item that galvanized certain closed newsNets had nothing to do with an obscure academic’s suicide, however interesting her antecedents might be. It was more immediate, and yet more historical: many of the item’s recipients found themselves rereading histories of the twenty-second century in order to make sense of it.

  Dirk McNamara has been found.

  The message came from mu-space. No newsNet in realspace made mention of Labyrinth: Pilots were masters at keeping secrets.

  And he still lives!

  <>

  ~ * ~

  55

  NULAPEIRON AD 3426

  Tom was flying. He had come loose from his seat, and now he was spinning through the air inside the arachnargos cabin. Three clone-warriors were flailing in zero-g.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Ankestion, secure in his pilot’s seat. ‘No choice.’

  As the view-window whirled past him, Tom caught a glimpse of the other three arachnargoi outside, their tendrils splayed, holding them against the big cargo hold’s deck. The shuttle in which all four arachnargoi crouched, including this one, was arcing high above the world. A small holodisplay showed the cloud cover below, before Tom rotated away and bumped gently into the cabin’s ceiling.

  ‘Transmission from one of the other arachnargoi,’ said Likardion. ‘For you, Warlord. From Lord Avernon.’

  ‘Open it up.’ Tom pushed off with his feet, steering down towards the deck. As he neared an empty chair, he reached out and grabbed hold. Hanging in place upside down, he added: ‘Are you all right, Avernon?’

  ‘Um, sure ... There’s something wrong with the comms, Tom. Your image is the wrong way up.’

  ‘That’s because I ... Never mind. Why are you breaking comms blackout?’

  ‘We’re inside the shuttle’s cargo hold. Can it matter?’

  ‘I don’t know. Hang on.’ Tom pulled himself down, turned the right way up, and hooked his legs under the chair. ‘What did you want to talk about?’

  ‘Oh, I see ... Microgravity is fun, isn’t it? I was wondering if you could ask the shuttle pilot to rotate the vessel along its major axis.’

  Tom looked at Ankestion, then back at the display.

  ‘Probably,’ he said. ‘How would that help?’

  ‘Are you kidding? I only know the coriolis effect as theory. If you throw an object across a rotating cabin in zero-g, it should—’

  ‘Destiny, Avernon. I know what it should do. Calm down, and we’ll talk when we reach Axolon Array, all right? End trans—’

  ‘No! I mean ... Look, Tom. I’ve got some shield generators ready to test. We can deploy some now, while we’re in orbit.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s what you want to do, isn’t it? Deploy a shield around the entire globe, so the Anomaly can’t reach through the Calabi-Yau dimensions?’

  ‘Um, right...’

  ‘So if I could deploy just a few, it might be possible to—’

  ‘Stay where you are,’ said Tom. ‘I’m coming over to see you.’

  With a tendril fastened round his waist, Tom was reminded of his schoolmate Kreevil, convicted and imprisoned inside sapphire fluid with a tentacle growing from his body, joining it to some shadowed mass whose true nature Tom had never identified. But this tendril, thin and elongated, snaked out across the echoing cargo hold, carrying Tom, and then held him in place, two metres above the deck.

  Avernon was working on a big macrodrone which was mag-fastened to the deck plates. A tendril held Avernon in position, and led back to the arachnargos in which he had travelled.

  The drone’s hollow interior was revealed by the opened carapace. Inside, a row of fist-sized copper devices shone. They were making a high humming sound, just at the edge of audible range.

  ‘I’m finishing up, Tom. There.’ Avernon waved to the pilot in the arachnargos cabin, and the tendril drew him back a few metres. ‘Ready to deploy.’

  The drone closed up, then rose from the deck, and headed towards an airlock.

  ‘How the Fate,’ said Tom, ‘do we get to see what’s happening?’

  ‘Um ...’ Avernon frowned, then shouted to the arachnargos: ‘Can you get us forward, to the shuttle cabin?’

  There was no reply, but two seconds later Tom and Avernon were being carried towards the front of the hold, as the tendrils elongated to impossible cord-like thinness. Then they were at a softening membrane door. The tendrils unwound from Tom’s and Avernon’s waists and gently pushed them through the liquefied membrane.

  They tumbled into the main control cabin of the orbital shuttle. All around the huge forward view-window was the black immensity of space. Off to their right was the white, beautiful sphere of Nulapeiron, their home.

  Then the shuttle was rising through the ethereal cloud that was the spinpoint layer, where tiny dots of white light shone as proudly as if they were stars in their own right.

  Beside Tom, a rumbling voice said: ‘It’s magical, by Rikleth.’ Kraiv was looking out into space, along with half a dozen other carls. ‘It’s magnificent.’

  ‘Inside each point of light’ - Tom pointed at the spinpoint layer - ‘time flows backwards. It’s magic, all right, but not a kind that I approve of.’

  From the forward controls, a pilot called out: ‘No sign of Enemy vessels. We are clear to proceed with the test.’

  Avernon pointed.

  ‘There goes the drone. Look.’

  Tom saw it: a small shape, growing smaller in the distance.

  ‘It’s slowing, relative to us,’ he said.

  ‘Getting ready to launch the— There. They’re out.’

  Copper sparkles caught the sunlight, as the tiny devices tumbled through space and the drone curved away, heading back towards the shuttle.

  Such tiny things to pin our hopes on.

  There was a pain in Tom’s lip, and the cupric taste of blood. Biting his own lip—

  Outside, space wavered.

  Oh, my Destiny.

  Wobbled.

  ‘Avernon? They’re in the spinpoint layer, right? Your devices.’

  ‘Shut up.’ Avernon had no thought of Tom’s rank. ‘It’s happening. I need to analyse ...’