‘Well,’ Genar-Hofoen said. ‘All very--’

‘Hold on,’ Tishlin said, holding up one finger. ‘There is one loose end. A single traceable survivor from the Problem Child who turned up five centuries ago; somebody it might be possible to talk to, despite the fact they’ve spent the last twenty-four millennia trying to avoid talking.’

‘Human?’

‘Human,’ Tishlin confirmed, nodding. ‘The woman who was the vessel’s formal captain.’

‘They still had that sort of thing back then?’ Genar-Hofoen said. He smiled. How quaint, he thought.

‘It was pretty nominal, even back then,’ Tishlin conceded. ‘More captain of the crew than of the boat. Anyway; she’s still around in a sort of abbreviated form.’ Tishlin’s image paused, watching Genar-Hofoen closely. ‘She’s in Storage aboard the General Systems Vehicle Sleeper Service.’

The representation paused, to let Genar-Hofoen react to the name of the ship. He didn’t, not on the outside anyway.

‘Just her personality is in there, unfortunately,’ Tishlin continued. ‘Her Stored body was destroyed in an Idiran attack on the Orbital concerned half a millennium ago. I suppose for our purposes that counts as a lucky break; she’d managed to cover her tracks so well - probably with the help of some sympathetic Mind - that if the attack hadn’t occurred she’d have remained incognito to this day. It was only when the records were scrutinised carefully after her body’s destruction that it was realised who she really was. But the point is that Special Circumstances thinks she might know something about the artifact. In fact, they’re sure she does, though it’s almost equally certain that she doesn’t know what she knows.’

Genar-Hofoen was silent for a while, playing with the cord of his dressing gown. The Sleeper Service. He hadn’t heard that name for a while, hadn’t had to think about that old machine for a long time. He’d dreamt about it a few times, had had a nightmare or two about it even, but he’d tried to forget about those, tried to shove those echoes of memories to some distant corner of his mind and been pretty successful at it too, because it felt very strange to be turning over that name in his mind now.

‘So why’s this all suddenly become important after two and a half millennia?’ he asked the hologram.

‘Because something with similar characteristics to that artifact has turned up near a star called Esperi, in the Upper Leaf-Swirl, and SC needs all the help it can get to deal with it. There’s no trillion-year-old sun-cinder this time, but an apparently identical artifact is just sitting there.’

‘And what am I supposed to do?’

‘Go aboard the Sleeper Service and talk to this woman’s Mimage - that’s the Mind-stored construct of her personality apparently . . .’ The image looked puzzled. ‘. . . New one on me

... Anyway, you’re supposed to try to persuade her to be reborn; talk her into a rebirth so she can be quizzed. The Sleeper Service won’t just release her, and it certainly won’t cooperate with SC, but if she asks to be reborn, it’ll let her.’