‘A future without gods,’ said Luca. ‘How marvellous that would be.’

Dolo nodded. ‘But if you had had such an excision - and you had stood under the arch of names - could you have appreciated its significance? Could you have understood, have felt it as you did? Oh, yes, I watched you. Perhaps those aspects of our brains, our minds, have evolved for a purpose. Why would they exist otherwise?’

Luca had no answer. Again he was shocked.

‘Anyhow,’ said Dolo, reverting to orthodoxy, ‘tampering with human evolution - or even passively allow it to happen - is itself against the Druz Doctrines. We win this war as humans or not at all - and we bend that rule at our peril. We have stayed united, across tens of thousands of light years and unthinkably huge populations, because we are all the same. Although that’s not to say that evolution isn’t itself taking mankind away from the norm that Hama Druz himself might have recognised.’

‘Commissary?’

‘Well, look around you. Most of these soldiers are the children of soldiers - obviously, how could it be otherwise? And the relentless selection of war is working to shape a new kind of human, better equipped for the fight. Combat survivors are the ones who get to breed, after all. Already their descendants are wiry, lithe, confident in the three-dimensional arena of low or zero gravity. Some studies even suggest that their eyes are adapting to the pressure of three-dimensional combat - that some of them can see velocity, for example, by perceiving subtle Doppler shifts in the colours of approaching or receding objects. Think what an advantage that would be in the battlefield! Another few thousand years of this and perhaps we will not recognise the soldiers who fight for the rest of us.’

‘I think I’m losing my bearings,’ said Luca truthfully.

Dolo patted his shoulder. ‘No. You’re just learning, is all.’

‘And what have you learned about my troopers?’ Teel had joined them on the small stage, and the troopers began to line up in rows before them.

Luca had learned to be honest with her. ‘I find them - strange.’

‘Strange?’

‘They have all ridden the Rock, yes?’

‘Most of them.’

‘Then they have seen comrades fall. They know they will be sent out again to a place where they must face the same horror. And yet, here and now, they laugh.’

Teel thought about that and answered carefully. ‘Away from the Front you don’t talk about what happens out there. It’s like - a secret. You’ve seen something beyond normal human experience. If you show your fear, or even admit it to yourself, then you’re allowing a leak between this, normal human life, and what lies out there. You’re letting it in. And if that happens there will be nowhere safe. Do you understand?’