Vlov didn’t need to look to see. “At the Substellar, yes. Just like Urthen, from what I hear, our world huddles close to its sun, which is a small, cool star—as stars go, anyhow. But at least it is a star! I can’t imagine living in a sky full of a big fat gassy bag of a planet…”

  “There is a monument,” murmured SheLu. “On the island. But it is a mighty wreck.”

  So it was, LuSi saw, when she got a chance to look. The island seen from above was a scarred mass of docks, dwellings, temples and pathways, all centred on a tremendous pillar—a pillar that was smashed, melted in places, with great fallen blocks larger than some of the buildings at its feet.

  “The work of the Xaian Normalisation,” SheLu said.

  “Yes,” said Vlov. “Once it was called the Eye. The monument itself was Substrate. Which is what we call the relics of an older technology found by humans on this world when they arrived.”

  JaEm asked, “Older?”

  His father said dryly, “Alien.”

  “We had nothing which could scar it, break it. We could build on top of it, or around it, and so we did. It is said that the Xaians used a starship drive to dismantle such features, here, at the Antistellar, at the Poles.”

  SheLu seemed to shudder. “Warp technology brought to a planet’s surface. What barbarism.”

  “Before the Xaians came, the monument was used to venerate the Controllers.”

  “But if that’s so,” PiRo said, “why would the Controllers not simply reverse the damage and restore the monument? It would take only a Word, after all.”

  Vlov, unperturbed, just grinned. “But the pilgrims continue to come here even so. Perhaps the wreckage adds another layer of lustre, of romance. The Controllers don’t need to fix it, you see. It works fine just as it is.”

  PiRo stared at him, and laughed. “There you have it, Zaen SheLu. Why do we never see any signs that the Controllers intervene in their Sim? Because they choose not to. A perfectly closed and irrefutable argument!”

  “If you say so,” SheLu murmured, indifferent.

  LuSi thought she heard her mother mutter prayers to the Controllers as the shuttle began its final approach.

  * * *

  Much of this world chimed with echoes of LuSi’s home planet.

  They landed near the shore of a continent called Seba, which in Urthen lore was the name of one of the giants who built the Ark. The landing facility was close to a city called New Denv, a name not so terribly far from Denva, the legendary home of the Sim Designers. Then they were transported to the largest coastal town, near the southern coast of Seba, with a grand view of the Navel and its truncated stump of a monument. This town was called Port Wils, and it stood on a mighty river of the same name. The name Wils was like a half-remembered fragment of the story of the Son of the giants who had extracted the Ship’s Law from the Will, the semi-incarnate purpose of the Designers themselves.

  Maybe all this did reflect some common origin, of a star-scattered mankind, she wondered. Or maybe it was all an artefact of the great smearing-out delivered by the Xaian Normalisation in the course of its hugely destructive rampage across the Bubble. Or maybe it really was an artefact of the world’s nature as a simulation, with these common elements being like tropes used and reused by the Designers on one world after another—their signatures, some speculated. One thing was sure; all this needed a deeper explanation than Jaem’s father’s austere but supremely rational notions of evolutionary convergence.

  After a voyage of fourteen years, the plan was to spend only perhaps twenty Days here—or, in the local argot, sixty Watches, each of which was precisely one-third of a Day. This had been negotiated in advance, in communications between the ship in its final sublight approach and the Temple authorities here at Port Wils. Though they had come so far, a few Days, it seemed, were all that was required for the Speaker of Speakers to make her decision concerning SheLu’s requests for support of her ongoing expedition in search of the origins of mankind within the greater Simulation.

  While the Zaen and the Jennin, priest and scholar, met with various minor functionaries in advance of their meeting with the Speaker of Speakers, JaEm and LuSi tentatively explored Port Wils, under the avuncular guidance of Speaker Tanz Lvov. The priorities of the Temple here soon became apparent. It was on Airtree, so it was said, in lost, semi-legendary times before the wave of destruction that was the Xaian Normalisation, that the cult of the Sim had first arisen—or perhaps, others said, it was a legacy of the Ark as it had passed this world. And in the generations since then, the Temple at Port Wils had made sure that it remained the hub of the faith—and therefore the destination of interstellar pilgrimages, from across all the human worlds where the faith had taken hold. All those worshippers, and all their tithes, flowed into Airtree, and specifically to Seba, and across Seba to Port Wils, gateway to the Navel itself. The Temple was a vast, efficient, and highly profitable organisation, and to the senior administrators a passing starship was a mere distraction.

  “No wonder they are so backward technologically,” JaEm said to LuSi as they wandered the crowded streets.

  “Not completely,” LuSi said. “The Speakers seem to have access to anti-ageing technologies just as good as ours, if not better. And their kitchens—”

  “Yes, but you know what I mean. Those surface-to-orbit shuttles might have come off the Ark itself. I don’t believe there’s a starship construction yard in the whole system.”

  “But there doesn’t need to be,” LuSi said gently. “The starships come here.”

  “Yes. Stuffed with money!”

  Beneath the surface of this bustling human city, itself millennia old, they came across traces of older habitations. The ancient alien material called the Substrate wasn’t restricted to the monument on the Navel, and nor had it all been eradicated by the Xaians. Here and there it persisted, as fragments of walls or foundations set out to linear or circular plans, apparently as unweathered and enduring as when their unknown builders had abandoned them, and built over by coarser human materials, bricks, concrete, steel and glass. And then, in cracks in the sidewalks, at the corners of neglected gardens, they would glimpse scraps of a different kind of life, unimposing mats and films of a black-green tint. The natives, Tanz Vlov told them, called this the Slime. It too had been here long before humans arrived, and the Human Suite had pushed it disregarded into the corners of its own world.

  Yet it persisted, LuSi thought, yet it persisted, like the Substrate, a hint of a deeper meaning to this world, like so many others, a meaning beneath the froth of human history. And that was true whether all of this was a dream of some electronic Memory or not.

  * * *

  The party from the Reality Dreams was called at length to a meeting with the Speaker of Speakers in a lavish building called the First Temple, set at the heart of Port Wils, with tremendous views of the Navel in the ocean to the south. They were kept waiting, not for long, in a kind of anteroom, where they were served drinks in cut-glass goblets borne on silver trays by silent junior clerics. Even this waiting room was tall, airy, thickly carpeted and every scrap of wall surface was covered by paintings, tapestries, and ornate designs—some of them holographic, so that when you turned your head this way and that different aspects of reality were presented, presumably a representation of the nature of the Simulation that was the core of the faith.

  At length they were called into an office, another vast, ornate room, but LuSi was impressed by a kind of working office at the centre of the room, an island of furniture in a sea of carpet, one large desk surrounded by chairs, smaller desks, blocks of filing cabinets and slate racks. A woman in a purple robe sat behind the desk, working at papers; this was the Speaker of Speakers herself, a woman of an ancient local family, called Kira Elos. She did not look up as the starship passengers were led to seats before her desk.

  They sat silently. Attendants fluttered back and forth, carrying slates and papers, murmuring to each other and the Speaker of Speakers. LuSi noticed standing in one corner a curious cage, of some fine silvery mesh, taller than she was. Light from the sun, which was overhead at this location, was reflected from a bank of mirrors into the cage, where a kind of tree grew, tall, spindly. Birds with silvery, mirrored wings fluttered around the tree, catching the light and reflecting its glow onto its leaves.

  At last Kira Elos looked up. “I apologise for keeping you waiting. You have come far to visit me.” She spoke what sounded like comprehensible Anglish to LuSi, but translators stood by discreetly, to aid the conversation.

  Jennin PiRo said smoothly, “But we know that other pilgrims come from much further away yet. Thank you for your time and attention, Speaker of Speakers…”

  He calmly introduced the party, one by one. The Speaker in turn introduced some of her staff. The names did not seem important to LuSi, and she made no attempt to memorise them.

  She was distracted by the tree in the cage. Every so often blinds would furl and unfurl, apparently automatically, so that the pattern of light falling on the cage changed, and the mirror-wing birds would flutter and fly, adjusting their position in response to the changing light.

  The Speaker of Speakers noticed her watching. “Distracting, isn’t it? And charming.”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “Don’t apologise. You’re right to be intrigued. There are few of these specimens left on this world—by which I mean the trees and the birds, for they form a symbiotic partnership, you see. The birds bring the tree light, and it feeds them in turn.”

  “But the light comes at a low angle,” JaEm said. “Artificially, thanks to these mirrors.”

  The Speaker nodded. “True. From which you deduce?”

  Jennin PiRo jumped in, and LuSi knew how much that irritated JaEm. “That this is a native of high latitudes—lands close to the terminator between day and permanent night. Where the sun is always low.”

  “Correct. But the mirror forests are almost gone, now, eradicated to make room for variants of wheat and rice and other crops we have developed to be tolerant of the poor light conditions.”

  SheLu nodded. “It is a common observation, demonstrable by archaeology, that a mass extinction of any native life follows the successful settlement of any world by humans. It is logical; the new life must supplant the old, if it is not to be pushed back.”

  The Speaker smiled. “I understand that. But even so, it is a miracle the birds survived.”

  She said that once this world had been full of animals and plants that seemed to have been designed, by some vanished precursor inhabitants—maybe the Substrate builders, maybe not—to serve as tools, or engines. There had been tractor beasts and tunnel-building moles and “photomoss,” a life form that collected useful energy from the sunlight.

  “All of these were exterminated by the Xaians. But the birds were spared, whether by intention or accident we are unsure—they are after all hard to trap. One strand of our theological thinking suggests that the Xaians were actually carrying out the will of the Controllers in their great extirpation. Perhaps the Sim had drifted from its parameters and needed cleansing. And so perhaps the birds’ continuing existence is somehow heretical.”

  LuSi, staring at the birds and their tree, could not believe anything so intricately exquisite could possibly be regarded as wrong, in any value system.

  The Speaker of Speakers considered SheLu. “Of course, Zaen, the Xaians’ enthusiastic destruction must have complicated your quest to trace the origin of mankind.”

  “If such a single origin exists at all,” PiRo put in.

  SheLu smiled. “Actually it makes it more interesting, intellectually. A challenge, set for us by the Controllers themselves, perhaps, to test the minds they have given us … Not even the Xaians could extirpate everything about human culture. It’s a commonplace that the human worlds share common concepts. Measures of time, for instance, like the Days and Years we use on Urthen—or the watches you use here. Each watch is about a third of our Day; your Great Year is three hundred and sixty of our Days, about the same as our Year. And so on. All this might derive from some primal source.”

  “Or from the passage of the Xaians,” PiRo said.

  “Perhaps. But then humans share sleep cycles that seem to have no relation to the natural periods of any of the settled worlds, though they do roughly correlate to a Day. No Xaian army could have imposed that.

  “And then there are our languages,” SheLu went on patiently. “We all seem to speak a version of what we of Urthen call Anglish. Languages of separated groups always diverge; we have observed this on our own world. But if our tongues did derive from some common root brought on the Ark, then the most frequently used terms would be those that endured with the least changes, and so would remain common across the worlds. Words like ‘we,’ ‘my,’ ‘our.’” She glanced at the cage. “‘Tree.’ ‘Bird.’ ‘Speaker,’ even, for positions of authority.”

  LuSi saw how the translators looked surprised at the obvious comprehensibility of these words.

  “And language, you see,” SheLu said now, “is much harder to eradicate than mere physical trappings. Just as a faith, like the Creed of the Sim, is harder to demolish than a mere temple of stone—or even a Substrate monument. It is possible, I believe, to trace the first spread of mankind across the stars through family trees of languages and their relations to each other. We can even see traces in these relationships of the passage of the Xaians, and their brief empire. My analysis suggests, by the way, that Airtree was one of the earliest worlds settled.”

  The Speaker nodded. “I think I understand your logic. Though I had always thought that our pretension to be an old world was mere snobbery … We have some scholars, you know, who speculate that ‘Airtree,’ the name for our world, is some derivation of ‘urth’ and ‘three.’ Both among your primal words, I imagine.”

  “That is so.”

  “And ‘Urthen,’” JaEm said, suddenly intrigued.

  The Speaker said, “Perhaps the name for mankind’s first world is buried in such names. ‘Urth.’ But some worlds’ names are probably more recent invention.”

  SheLu said, “Like ‘Windru,’ named for a ruling dynasty of that world, yes.”

  “What about your ‘Urthen,’ though? Urth … ten? That seems tenuous.”

  JaEm said, “You know, a starship engineer might suggest the real root is ‘Urth n.’ The ‘n’ stands for an unknown number. Perhaps by then the settlers had lost count.”

  “Or perhaps the name is some kind of black joke. And perhaps we should think of the primal world you seek as Urth I.” The Speaker pulled her lip. “This is all fascinating. Suggestive rather than conclusive, however.”

  “Of course,” conceded SheLu.

  “But it is by following such leads that you hope to identify mankind’s primal world? If it exists,” she added, with a nod to PiRo.

  “That is my strategy. Given the fragments of legend we have, I anticipate we will find an oceanic world. The flooded planet from which mankind had to flee…”

  Elos studied papers on her desk. “One would think such a world would be at the centre of the Bubble. The root from which we spread, in three dimensions. Instead you are seeking to go to the edge of human space—beyond Windru, in fact, the Xaians’ world, the most densely populated world at one extreme of our domain of colonisation.”

  “That is plausible,” SheLu said, “given a model of the first flight that is consistent with the surviving legends. That is, a single flight across the stars, scattering colonies as it went. Subsequent secondary colonisation waves have set out from those first settlements. In that case the origin would indeed lie at one extreme of the Bubble, just as the root of a tree,” she said, glancing at the cage, “lies at one extreme of its structure.”

  “And what you want of me is an Instrument of Authority.”

  “I believe that is the appropriate form, yes. The worlds I visit, especially Windru, must open up their archives and other treasures, on your authority. Also we may require material support of various kinds.”

  The Speaker smiled. “I am no Xaian emperor to impose my rule on other worlds.”

  “Nevertheless your authority as Speaker of Speakers will carry a great deal of weight on any world where the Creed is cherished.”

  “True enough.” She turned now to PiRo. “And you, Jennin PiRo. I understand you are not an adherent of our Creed.”

  “Regretfully, no.”

  “Be not regretful. The Sim Designers made you as you are, scepticism and all, and cherish you even so.”

  PiRo flared, “But that’s exactly the kind of circular argument which—”

  LuSi touched his arm. “Not now, Jennin,” she murmured.

  The Speaker of Speakers said, “My advisors have had constructive discussions with you, Jennin PiRo. You are a sceptic, as you have admitted, yet you accompany Zaen SheLu on a quest that seeks to establish the truth about mankind—a quest guided by our Creed. Why have you devoted your own life, and your son’s, to a mission you reject?”

  PiRo glanced at SheLu. “Well, it was rather forcibly suggested by my own university that I should come along. This hundred-year jaunt is high profile and very expensive. But I was glad to come. Speaker, I do not accept your Creed. But as I told your advisers, I accept that as a human institution it has some beneficial value. It has inculcated a belief that the universe is rational, and that questions we ask of it will yield meaningful answers. Of course, if it were an artefact, that would be so. As such your Creed lies at the philosophical root of all modern science.

  “Yet there is potential for harm, if the Creed ultimately stifles our inquisitiveness. After all, any question—even about my own personality!—can be answered by appealing to the whim of the Designers. ‘They made it that way because they made it that way.’

  “Now, I believe that the Zaen will fail in her quest to find a single origin of mankind. The multi-origin hypothesis of the beginnings of mankind is philosophically simpler—and, if I may say so, more satisfying. But whatever the outcome of her quest, the result will be significant for ages to come, either way. And I am very strongly motivated to ensure that the investigation is carried out to the highest scientific standards.”