They stood on a low hill, planed to an eerily flat surface about five and a half acres in extent, thick with dust despite the scouring summer winds, and covered with the rounded-off remains of architecture. There were pockets of vegetation here and there in the avenues between the ziggurats – clumps of small red flowers, groups of shade trees under which Alyssia’s people gathered each mealtime to rehearse their sense of excitement and optimism. They were discovering new things every day. A white tower of cloud built itself up in the blue sky above the mountains  to the south; smoke rose from an adjacent hilltop which seemed to be part of some other excavation. In the end, Gaines thought, anything you can say about ritual sacrifice is just another act of appropriation. It reveals more about you than about history.

‘So what’s different here?’ he said.

Alyssia Fignall glanced away, smiling to herself. Then she said: ‘It worked. They moved the planet.’

Suddenly she was looking direct into Gaines’ eyes, deliberately seeking out his soul, making contact, her own eyes wide with awe. ‘Rig, everyone has been so wrong about this place. That’s why I called you! A hundred  thousand  years ago, using only sacrifice – mass strangulation,  we think,  of perhaps  half the population – these people moved  their  planet  twenty  light minutes out  of orbit. We think they were trying to keep it in the Goldilocks zone. There’s evidence of increased stellar output,’ here she shrugged, ‘though to be realistic, it’s not high enough to explain much. In the texts we found, they don’t seem to be able to describe exactly what they’re afraid of. Soon after that they give up – vanish from the historical record.’

‘Possibly they had some regrets,’ Gaines suggested.

‘Not in the way I think you mean.’

They stared silently across the hilltop, then  she added, ‘They were some sort of diapsid.’

‘Alyssia, this is a result.’

‘Thank you.’

‘What do you need?’

She laughed. ‘Funding.’

‘I can get you more people,’ he offered.

He received a dial-up from the Aleph project. Alyssia moved away a little out of politeness, her feet kicking up taupe dust with a high content  of wood-ash and wind-ground  bone. Her people were finding thick bands of the same substance in polar ice cores; there, it was glued together by fats.

She was still excited. That morning, aware she would be seeing Rig again after so many years, she had picked out a short sleeve knit sweater in red botany wool, fastened with a line of tiny fauxnacre buttons  along one shoulder; pairing  it with a flared calf-length skirt of faded green cotton twill. Her thin tan feet said she was in her forties, but the sunshine and the clothes celebrated only enthusiasm and youth. Gaines stared at her with a kind of absent pleasure, while spooky action at a distance filled the FTL pipe and a voice he recognised said: