Sometimes he felt queasy, perhaps even guilty, at the distorted fate to which generation upon generation had been subjected, all for the sake of a long-dead pharaoh and her selfish, hubristic dream. But individual transients were soon gone, their tiny motes of joy or pain soon vanishing into the dark. Their very brevity was comforting.

Of course, if biology was replacing even the deepest layers of mind as the shaping element in the mission’s destiny, Rusel’s own role became still more important, as the only surviving element of continuity, indeed of consciousness.

Whatever, there was no going back, for any of them.

Andres was still watching the Autarchs. ‘You know, immortality, the defeat of death, is one of mankind’s oldest dreams, But immortality doesn’t make you a god. You have immortality, Rusel, but, save for your crutch the Ship, you have no power. And these - animals - have immortality, but nothing else.’

‘It’s monstrous.’

‘Of course! Isn’t life always? But the genes don’t care. And in the Autarchs’ mindless capering, you can see the ultimate logic of immortality: for an immortal, to survive, must in the end eat her own children.’

But everybody on this Ship was a child of this monstrous mother, Rusel thought, whose twisted longings had impelled this mission in the first place. ‘Is that some kind of confession, pharaoh?’

Andres didn’t reply. Perhaps she couldn’t. After all this wasn’t Andres but a Virtual, a software-generated comfort for Rusel’s fading consciousness, at the limit of its programming. And any guilt he saw in her could only be a reflection of himself.

With an effort of will he dismissed her.

One of the adults, a male, sat up, scratched his chest, and loped to the centre of the feeding pit. The young fled at his approach. The male scattered the last bits of primary-colour food, and picked up something small and white. It was a skull, Rusel saw, the skull of a child. The adult crushed it, dropped the fragments, and wandered off, aimless, immortal, mindless.

Rusel withdrew, and sealed up the gnawed-through bulkhead. After that he set up a new barrier spanning the Ship parallel to the bulkhead, and opened up the thin slice of the vessel between the walls to intergalactic vacuum, so that nothing could come through that barrier. And he never again gave any thought to what lay on the other side.

X

Twenty-five thousand years after the end of his world, Rusel heard that he was to be saved.

‘Rusel. Rusel . . .’

Rusel wanted the voices to go away. He didn’t need voices now - not Diluc’s, not even Andres’s.