Shoved into underspace, dragged between shadow stars, Freeman travelled, thumbing his nose at relativity, in the cusp of a technology his unaugmented mind could not comprehend. Between runcibles he ceased to exist in the Einsteinian universe. He was beyond an event horizon, stretched to an infinite surface with no thickness, travelling between stars as billions of those called ‘quince’ had done before him.

Done, in that instant when time is divided by infinity and brought to a standstill.

Done, in the eternal moment.

Freeman passed by 253 light-years. The second runcible caught him, dragged him back over the horizon and channelled the vast build-up of energy he was carrying . . . only . . . only this time something went wrong. Freeman passed through the cusp still holding his charge. The Einsteinian universe took hold of him and ruthlessly applied its laws, and in that immeasurable instant he appeared at his destination, travelling the smallest fraction possible below the speed of light.

On the planet Samarkand, in the Andellan system, Freeman supplied the energy for a thirty-megaton nuclear explosion; the atoms of his body yielding up much of their substance as energy. Eight thousand people died in the explosion. Another 2000 died of radiation sickness in the weeks that followed. A few hundred survived even this, but, without the energy tap from the runcible buffers and with most installations knocked out, the cold returned to Samarkand and they froze to death. Two survived, but they were not human, and it was open to conjecture that they were even alive. His family and friends mourned Freeman when they discovered what had happened to him, and sometimes, when she was in a good mood, a half-catadapt woman smiled at a memory; other times she winced.

* * *

Like a discarded child-god’s building block, the two-kilometre cube of ceramal which was the headquarters of Earth Central Security rested on the shore of Lake Geneva. There were no windows or doors in this structure and, for the 50,000 people that worked there, the only ingress was via runcible. They came in naked and left naked, and were scrutinized molecule by molecule each way, yet even they had no idea what information was gathered, what decisions were reached, and what orders given. Each time they left, they left part of their minds inside, downloaded into another mind that knew it all.

Some comedian, at the inception of the project, had christened him Hal, after the computer in an ancient classic, but that was now classified information. Earth Central was an AI, and an exceptionally large AI for a time when a planetary co-ordinator could be lost in an ashtray. Earth Central was the size of a tennis ball, but then terabytes of information were processed in its etched-atom circuits in picoseconds; information received, collated, acted upon. Orders given. The ruler of the human polity was not human.

Unbuffered jump to Samarkand—confirmed.

Major buffer failure—confirmed.

—Analysis Of Cyclic Rebellion by Edward Landel—

ORDER: AGENT 2XG4112039768 ON RUNCIBLE TRACE.

Possible alien involvement—unconfirmed.