Just for a moment, as they ascended, he caught a glimpse of glowing sapphire at Zhao-ji’s wrist. Then Zhao-ji tugged his sleeve down arid looked upwards, towards their destination.

  Their ascent began to slow.

  The gel-flow twisted, spilling them onto a white ceramic floor, then curled back inside the shaft proper. Tom and Zhao-ji were crouched in a low chamber; before them, a metal door was opening. Grass and dirt spilled outside: they were in a hollow hillock, hidden in the landscape.

  ‘ “Madmen lead, fools follow.” ‘ Zhao-ji went first through the opening, then looked back at Tom and grinned. ‘So which one are you?’

  ‘Grow up, why don’t you?’

  But Tom was smiling as he passed through the doorway, and stepped out onto the open ground. He took in a deep breath of cool, sweet air.

  ‘Fantastic,’ he said. ‘I love this place.’

  Now even Zhao-ji was looking doubtful. ‘Fate, Tom. I can put up with the surface. That doesn’t mean I love it. What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘Madmen lead…’

  ‘Right.’

  They walked out onto grassy heathland.

  The sky was warm yellow, blotted with chocolate-brown clouds. The long grasses held a silvery sheen. It would have been perfect, but Tom had not figured their exact position: as they crossed a ridgetop and looked down at a glittering expanse, he suddenly realized that the Lake of Glass lay below.

  Why did you bring me here?

  The glass had once formed a vast ornate structure reaching up above the surface. Within it, a quarter of a million subsumed men, women and children had melded into the greater Blight, attempting to beam its cry for help across the light-years to the parent Anomaly. Tom had played his part in destroying the Blight and saving the world, but the price ...

  Encapsulated in the glass, mouths open and eyes bulging, swirling hair forever frozen, were the two hundred and fifty thousand people who had perished in a single moment, when the Blight vanished from existence.

  Zhao-ji placed his hand on Tom’s shoulder.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘No. Look up.’

  Something was descending from the sky.

  A white shuttle moved between a gap in the clouds, disappeared for a moment, then slid back into visibility, drawing closer to the ground by the second. As Tom watched, it decelerated hard, adopted a level attitude and hovered.

  ‘Whose is it?’

  ‘You haven’t guessed? It’s the Collegium, Tom. That’s a Collegiate shuttle.’

  ‘And what do they want with orbital vehicles?’

  ‘That, my friend, is what I’m here to show you. For the moment ... just watch.’

  The Strontium Dragons, like their peer societies, were capable of formulating game plans that lasted centuries. Tom wondered what part he was playing in their advancement right now.

  An area of heathland glimmered beneath the sun, and Tom realized it was a wide patch of membrane, big enough for the shuttle to drop through. As the membrane liquefied it shone more brightly; and Tom could almost hear a wet sucking sound as the shuttle lowered itself through and disappeared from sight, with the membrane re-forming in place above it.

  ‘Who’s aboard?’ said Tom.

  ‘No-one. D’you expect people to go up in those things?’ Zhao-ji’s grin twisted. ‘We’re not all as mad as you are.’

  ‘So it’s AI-controlled. Then what’s the cargo?’

  Zhao-ji shook his head.

  ‘Why don’t we just go and take a look?’

  Then he turned around and headed back towards the hillock, and the concealed drop-shaft which would take them back into the buried safety of the civilized world.

  Perhaps it’s not the Strontium Dragons who have something to gain, Tom decided, as he followed Zhao-ji. Perhaps it’s Strostiv who has a goal here.

  The grassy doorway opened.

  Tom and Zhao-ji entered, then stepped side by side into the viscous metallic gel, and sank down inside the shaft together.

  They walked into a large bay. The bay adjoined a huge hall shaped like a horizontal cylinder, stretching the best part of a kilometre. A thick transparent view-window separated Tom and Zhao-ji from the interior.

  ‘That’s hard vacuum inside,’ said Zhao-ji. ‘We can see everything from out here. Look.’

  He pointed. A long balcony, offset from the hall, ran alongside. Like this bay, it was partitioned off by thick windows.

  ‘Look at what, exactly?’

  ‘Well, this ...’

  The shuttle, held in place by great metallic clamps in the body of the hall, was cracking its dorsal doors open.

  ‘They’re collecting the harvest,’ added Zhao-ji.

  ‘Harvest? What the Fate do you harvest in orbit?’

  ‘Something very important. We’ve been doing it for centuries.’

  Tom noted the we. Perhaps the collaboration between Collegium and Zhongguo Ren societies went deeper than he had thought. Perhaps the Strontium Dragons’ involvement in the abortive revolution had been more equivocal and manipulative than anyone realized.

  ‘All right, Zhao-ji. Show me.’

  Shepherded by drones, a misty cloud rose out of the shuttle and hung billowing in the vacuum. Inside it, tiny points of hard white light were shining.

  Tom opened his mouth, closed it. Zhao-ji would explain in his own time.

  ‘This way, Tom.’

  They stepped onto a dark strip that ran along the floor. Zhao-ji gestured, and the strip began to flow. It carried them to the bay’s edge, flowed around a corner, and then followed alongside the vast cylindrical hall.

  Inside the hall, the misty cloud was moving along the hall’s central axis, at approximately the same pace.

  They tracked the cloud’s progress to the far end, where a huge cone formed of magnets collimated the cloud into a narrow beam, pushing it along a solid horizontal shaft that was hidden from sight.

  ‘Now what?’ said Tom.

  ‘Now you see what this is all about.’ Zhao-ji looked more glum than Tom had ever seen him. ‘And I hope that you don’t hate me for it.’

  The moving strip bore them onwards through a dark windowless tunnel, then brought them out into a bright-lit observation chamber where medics in orange gowns stared through view-windows, manipulating med-drones with intricate hand gestures.

  What the Fate?

  In the chamber below, on the other side of the glass, drones were working on a shaven-headed child who lay on a couch. Tom could not tell whether it was a boy or a girl. Whichever, the child lay quiescent, eyes open, oblivious to the robotic arms peeling back his/her scalp and lasing tiny holes into the skull.

  All around, drones used magnetic fields to marshal the misty cloud and its load of shining white geometric points, funnelling the stuff downwards, into the child’s freshly exposed brain.

  Oh, sweet Destiny.

  Tom had forgotten where he was: the place where ‘Oracles are created, not born’. The thing was, no-one outside knew about the process itself; it was the most heavily guarded secret the Collegium possessed. There was no reason to reveal it to a sworn enemy.

  ‘Zhao-ji. What are they doing?’

  ‘What they’ve always done, my friend. Exactly what they’ve always done.’

  ~ * ~

  7

  NULAPEIRON AD 3423

  Strostiv was waiting for Tom in his antechamber. Zhao-ji took his leave, departing amid an escort of hard-faced 49s, footsoldiers of the Strontium Dragons, trained in wu shu and weaponry and utterly ruthless in protecting their senior officers. They caught the vibrations from Tom’s repressed anger, and kept watchful gazes on him until they were out of sight.

  Tom had not spoken a word since they left the medical chamber.

  ‘My apologies,’ said Strostiv, ‘if I have offended you.’

  There was no reply that Tom could make, short of striking out with a half-fist to the larynx and ending Strostiv’s life here and now. And what good would that do? The Collegium and its work would still go on.

  Finally, Tom exerted all of his self-control and said in a tight but civilized voice: ‘There was a technical meeting you wanted me to attend?’

  ‘That’s right.’ Strostiv looked relieved. ‘That’s exactly right, old chap.’

  ‘So where—?’

  ‘Do follow me, my Lord. Right in here. We’re all set up and waiting.’

  Strostiv’s technical expert was a man called Zilwen. An obsidian skullcap clasped his head. Whether it fitted over his scalp or replaced it, Tom could not tell.

  They convened in the same chamber as before, with the purple conference table over which a large abstract holodisplay was now billowing. Zilwen gestured an intricate network diagram into being as Tom took his seat.

  The core equation modelled the expansion of the entire universe from the viewpoint of notional metaspace. Its relevance was obvious: the future lies (always) in the direction in which the universe is bigger. All the basic equations of physics are time-reversible: swap the sign of the time variable in any particle’s trajectory, and you merely get a particle moving in the opposite direction.

  There is no preferred past or future at the tiniest scales. It is the great temporal mystery.

  If the universe begins to collapse ... the ancients’ notion was of a Big Bang, expansion, then collapse to a Big Crunch. But by symmetry, Tom knew, you actually get two Big Bangs, both growing towards the future time when they meet and join.

  These are the equations, Tom thought, that led to my blade in d’Ovraison‘s heart.

  Would the cross-over time actually occur? Irrelevant. Provided you replicated conditions as if the universe were shrinking, you obtained regions of spacetime where time flowed in the opposite direction. Some of the neural groups in Oracles’ minds experienced just such negative time: it was the basis of their abilities and their damaged, fragmented personalities.

  No-one knew how such a feat of spacetime engineering was possible, only that it had been done. Living Oracles were the proof.

  ‘Perhaps you’ve wondered,’ said Zilwen, ‘how Oracular minds can be constructed.’

  ‘I’m willing to learn,’ Tom muttered.

  All the better to destroy you.

  Zilwen gestured, and the display rotated and transformed. It showed a white spherical cloud - a hollow sphere - surrounding the world.

  ‘From space, it doesn’t shine so obviously’ - Zilwen brightened the display further - ‘but it is there, in exactly this configuration.’

  ‘What is there?’

  ‘The spinpoint field, of course.’ Zilwen glanced at Strostiv, who did not react. ‘What did you think you just observed? The spinpoints we’ve harvested from orbit.’

  ‘And what,’ asked Tom slowly, ‘is a spinpoint?’

  Zilwen was one of those brilliant fools, technically hypercompetent but unable to explain his thoughts, and his mouth worked as he tried to find the words.

  Then Tom held up his hand, forestalling him.

  ‘Fate! You’ve got singularities—’

  Strostiv was smiling now.

  ‘—of negative time. That’s what a spinpoint is: an infinitesimal knot where time is reversed.’

  Zilwen nodded. To Strostiv, he said: ‘He got it, fast enough. I’d say he’s able to do the job.’

  Strostiv shrugged, smiling at Tom in apology for Zilwen’s manner. But at least Zilwen was not concealing his goals.

  ‘You want me to work for the Collegium?’ Tom stared at them. ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘It’s the perfect place for your research interests, don’t you think? You have no demesne to rule, and the money must be running out, particularly with the cyborg affair: I know how much those technicians cost.’

  ‘It’ll be fun.’ Zilwen gazed at him with round, almost childlike eyes. ‘We have top of the range equipment. Absolutely the best.’

  Tom remembered another child, with cut-open scalp and the drones removing humanity from the wet, exposed brain.

  ‘I don’t see ...’ Tom would milk them of information before refusing outright. ‘I still don’t see how you create the spinpoints in the first place. It seems impossible.’

  Zilwen frowned.

  ‘Um ... I thought you realized ...’

  ‘We’re working on it,’ Strostiv interrupted with a politician’s smoothness. ‘Whether it’s the next year or the next century, we’ll get there. We’re guaranteed success, don’t you see? What could be better than allying yourself to a project that you already know will be a winner?’

  Even with the logosophical model hanging over the table and the hints contained in Strostiv’s words, it took several long moments for Tom to put the pieces together and blurt out his reaction. ‘My Fate,’ he said. ‘You don’t know how to create spinpoints. You don’t know—’

  He was out of his chair and standing now.

  ‘—because they haven’t been created yet.’

  Waves of silence seemed to crash in the room, and then Strostiv sighed, reclaiming a sense of normality. ‘That’s the nature, I’m afraid, of negative time.’

  ‘The spinpoints’ origins lie in our future. Our descendants will create them.’

  ‘Or we will, tomorrow.’ Strostiv raised his hands, palms up. ‘Who can tell?’

  ‘And you want me to work on this?’

  ‘Well, of course we can discuss your—’

  ‘You know so much about the nature of time. Do you understand the word never?’

  Tom kicked his chair aside. It spun across the floor and fell clattering. Then he strode from the chamber breathing hard, not looking back, knowing he might kill someone if he did.

  An hour later he was on a lev-platform accompanied by four greystone warriors, skimming through raw, broken tunnels only fitfully lit by glow-fungus. In some, the fungus was sparse or diseased, and therefore the air was bad; they moved through those tunnels at high speed, mainly for Tom’s benefit: it was said that greystone warriors could function for many minutes on end without breathing.

  The escort, he assumed, was not for Tom’s protection so much as the Collegium’s: they might wonder what he was capable of doing. (The warriors might, just might, have been assigned to get rid of him, now that he knew the Collegium’s secret. Tom half-hoped they would try; he had an awful lot of anger to purge.)

  But then the lev-platform was descending without incident, and the officer was saying in an incongruously soft voice: ‘The Lady Elva is through there, sir.’

  A dark opening in the rockface emitted clinks of sound. The technicians must be already working on the Jack.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Tom, stepping off the platform.

  It rose and spun away, then flew back the way it had come.

  Tom stepped through the opening.

  Elva was there. Tom took in a deep breath and let it out in a sigh, releasing his rage, letting it dissipate. One of the technicians, kneeling, glanced up at him, then continued with her work.

  On the rough stone wall, the Jack’s ruined half-head turned slightly. Its - his - one intact microfaceted eye focused on Tom.

  ‘You ... came .... back.’

  ‘I said I would.’

  ‘Promised... death.’

  Tom had sworn to end the Jack’s agony. ‘I’d rather bring you life.’

  Charcoal sprayed across the rock. Remnants of the cyborg’s destroyed torso melded with charred stone, fused into the damaged wall. Any other lifeform would have been obliterated; but tenacity was at the core of a Jack’s programmed being.

  ‘Axolon?’ said Elva. ‘We need to take you offline now, for a while. All right?’

  ‘...ess.’

  The cyborg’s head drooped as if tired. Tom could not imagine the pain and exhaustion he had undergone.

  ‘Now.’ The kneeling tech gestured, and the Jack froze still.

  ‘Whew.’ Elva rubbed her face, then smiled at Tom. ‘It’s going to be a lot of effort just to prise and chip him from the rock, even with micro-cutters. After that... I really don’t know how we’re going to fix him.’

  ‘But we have to try.’