But Rusel himself saw them as if through a flawed lens; he could hear little, feel less, smell or taste nothing. It was like walking around in a skinsuit, he thought.

He was an angry god, though. The rules of Shipboard life had been broken, he thundered. And he didn’t just mean the recent mess. There must be no more water empires, and no knowledge empires either: the Druids would have to make sure that every child knew the basic rules, of Ship maintenance and genetic-health breeding.

He ordered that the Autarchs should not be returned to their seats of power. Instead, the governing would be done, for this generation, by a Druid - he picked out one terrified-looking woman at random. As long as she ruled wisely and well, she would have the Elder’s backing. On her death the people would select a successor, who could not be more closely related to her predecessor than second cousin. No more dynasties.

The old Autarchs and their brood, meanwhile, were to be spared. They would be shut away permanently in their amphitheatre prison, where there were supplies to keep them alive. Rusel believed they and their strange slow-growing children would die off; within a generation, a tick of time, that problem would go away. He had done his share of killing, he thought.

Then he sighed. The worst of it had still to be faced. ‘Bring me Hilin,’ he ordered.

They dragged in the corridor king, tied up with strips of cloth. He had been assaulted, Rusel saw; his face was battered and one arm seemed broken. This erstwhile rebel was already being punished for his blasphemy, then, by those who sought the favour of the Elder. But Hilin faced Rusel defiantly, strength and intelligence showing in his face. Rusel’s scarred heart ached a little more, for strength and intelligence were the last features you wanted in a transient.

Hilin had to die, of course. His flayed corpse would be displayed before the shrine of the Elder, as a warning to future generations. But Rusel didn’t have the courage to watch it done. He remembered the man in the electric-blue skinsuit: he always had been a coward, he thought.

As he returned to his Cloister, he looked back once more. ‘And clean up this damn mess,’ he said.

He knew it would take a long time, even on his timescales, before he managed to forget the contemptuous defiance on Hilin’s young face. But Hilin went into the dark like all his transient ancestors, and soon his siblings and nieces and nephews and everybody who looked remotely like him went too, gone, all gone into the sink of time, and soon only Rusel was left alive to remember the rebellion.

Rusel would never leave the Cloister again.

VIII

Some time after that, there was a decimating plague.