The sun glared, impossibly bright. The planet was a floor of roiling gas, semi-infinite. Above, Hama could see the Post’s sensor installation. It was drifting off into space, dangling its tether like an impossibly long umbilical. It was startlingly bright in the raw sunlight, like a sculpture.

From beneath the planet’s boiling clouds, a soundless concussion of light flickered and faded. Five thousand years of history had ended, a subplot in mankind’s tangled evolution; the long watch was over. La-ba squirmed, distressed, her hands clasped over the bump at her belly.

Hama held the two lovers close.

The flitter turned and squirted into hyperspace, heading for Earth.

Much later, the primordial cosmic thoughts detected by the ‘drones’ of that Observation Post would be recognised, and valued - and the monads, minds from the dawn of time, would play a crucial role in the human capture of the Galaxy Core. All that later.

It is amusing to see mayflies forget and rediscover, forget and rediscover, over and over. Commissaries like Arles and Hama with their alien symbiotes imagined that their longevity treatments were new, their long lives a novel strategy.

To us even they were mayflies.

The Galaxy blazed with war. Still time stretched, the past forgotten, the foreknown future static. The war became perpetual, a grinder of humanity.

Yet humanity prevailed.

RIDING THE ROCK - AD 23,479

RIDING THE ROCK

AD 23,479

I

When Luca arrived in the Library conference room, the meeting between Commissary Dolo and Captain Teel was already underway. They sat in hard-backed armchairs, talking quietly, while trays of drinks hovered at their elbows.

Over their heads Virtual dioramas swept by like dreams, translucent, transient. These were the possible destinies of mankind, assembled from the debris of interstellar war by toiling bureaucrats here in Earth’s Library of Futures, and displayed for the amusement of the Library’s guests. But neither Dolo nor Teel were paying any attention to the spectacle.

Luca waited by the door. He was neither patient nor impatient. He was just a Novice, at twenty years old barely halfway through his formal novitiate into the Commission, and Novices expected to wait.

But he knew who this Captain Teel was. An officer in the Green Navy, she had come from her posting on the Front - the informal name for the great ring of human fortification that surrounded the Core of the Galaxy, where the Xeelee lurked, mankind’s implacable foe. The Navy and the Commission for Historical Truth were also, of course, ancient and unrelenting enemies. There was no way Teel, therefore, would adopt the ascetic dress code of the Commission, even here in its headquarters. But her uniform was a subdued charcoal grey shot through with green flashes, and her hair, if not shaved, was cut short; this fighting officer had shown respect, then, for the hive of bureaucrats she had come to visit.

At last Dolo noticed Luca.

Luca said, ‘You sent for me, Commissary.’