‘Exactly the same. We found ships, and then we found a whole world infested like that.’ She looked up. ‘But it stops, you know? Sentient life sets this Jain technology growing, it takes something, technological knowledge . . . something. Those sentient beings can use it for a while to obtain power, knowledge, whatever, then it seeds, destroying them in the process. Lucifer’s people thought they had it under control.’

‘So what happened?’

‘Obviously they did not have it under control.’

‘I meant during your journey.’

‘Lucifer retreated to his chamber, and for a while the dreams returned. We continued our survey, moving into the heart of the Maker realm. It was small compared to the Polity—mainly in a stellar cluster of about five thousand suns. Apparently this was due to what Lucifer called the “Consolidation”. Their civilization expanded to a certain point, but on becoming aware of other spaceborne civilizations—their first encounter was with Jain technology, so you can imagine how wary that made them—they decided on no further expansion until they felt themselves ready.’

‘So Lucifer came out of his chamber.’

‘Yes, very agitated—it showed, even through the Golem he inhabited—but then his entire species seemed to have been wiped out. I guess that sort of disaster is going to put an overload into the buffers of even the most hardened individualist.’ Chaline shrugged. ‘He provided us with signal codes and frequencies to transmit on—Maker realspace com was on the wide band of the hydrogen spectrum, and U-space com was weirdly encoded. We searched and we called and called, but there was nothing at first. Then we started to get stuff back on Maker channels, but it was loaded with programs we didn’t really want—they propagated like viruses then self-assembled into some really nasty subversion routines. You could call them worms but they were a damned sight more complex than that—nearly AI. It was only with Lucifer’s help that we managed to shut them down. Victoria, the ship AI, needed to completely disconnect herself while we cleared the rest of the systems. One program even took over a nanoassembler and started producing this Jain tech, so we had to eject an entire laboratory into space.’

‘So that means there was Jain tech out there still active?’

‘Yes, or rather Jain-subverted Makers in the last stages of dissolution.’

‘Then what?’

‘We found no sentient life at all in a further twelve solar systems we surveyed. But we did find stations and ships crammed with Jain substructures; worlds where destructive battles had been fought, some of them radioactive, some showing no sign that they were once living other than by the massive weapons in orbit that had burned them down to the magma. All the Jain tech there was somnolent. Its seeds were spread through space—awaiting the right kind of sentient touch that would awake them to the fertile earth of a new civilization.’

‘Very poetic’