Futurity, briefed by the Hierocrat, knew exactly what he meant. ‘A little more than a thousand years.’

Poole closed his eyes and massaged his temples. ‘You bastards, ’ he said. ‘I’m your Virtual Jesus. A simulacrum messiah. And I wasn’t good enough. So you put me in memory store, a box where I couldn’t even dream, and left me there for a thousand years. And now you’ve dug me up again. Why? To crucify me on a wormhole mouth, like the first Poole?’

Futurity was growing irritated. ‘I know nothing of Jesus, or crucifying. But I always thought I understood Michael Poole.’

‘How could you? He’s been dead twenty millennia.’

Futurity said relentlessly, ‘Then perhaps I misjudged his character. We didn’t bring you back to harm you. We didn’t bring you back for you at all. You’re here because somebody in trouble is asking for your help. Maybe you should think about somebody other than yourself, as Michael Poole surely would have done.’

Poole shook his head. ‘I don’t believe it. Are you trying to manipulate me?’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it, sir.’

Poole sipped his unreal whisky. Then he sighed. ‘So what’s the problem?’

III

Poole had no physical location as such; he ‘was’ where he was projected. It would have been possible for him to be manifested aboard the Ask Politely by projection from the Ecclesia’s underground caches. But Poole himself pressed for the data that defined him to be downloaded into the ship’s own store, as otherwise lightspeed delays would introduce a barrier between himself and this fragile woman who was asking for his help.

What Poole wanted, it seemed, Poole got.

It took a day for the Ecclesiast authorities to agree transfer protocols with Captain Tahget and his crew. Futurity, no specialist in such matters, found this delay difficult to understand, but it turned out that Poole’s definition was stored at the quantum level. ‘And you can transfer quantum information, ’ Poole said, ‘but you can’t copy it. So your monks can’t make a backup of me, Futurity, any more than they can of you. Kind of reassuring, isn’t it? And that’s why the monks are twitchy.’ But Poole was furious that the Ecclesiasts ensured that Tahget understood they owned the copyright in him and would protect their ‘intellectual property’ against ‘piracy’. ‘Copyright! In me! What do they think I am, a worm genome?’

Meanwhile, Captain Tahget was insulted by the very suggestion of piracy, and he complained about the delays for which nobody was compensating him, not to mention the risk of allowing the unstable situation of a woman with a bomb aboard his ship to continue for so long.

These transactions seemed extraordinary to Futurity, and terribly difficult to cope with. After all, when he had first gone up to the orbiting starship, Futurity hadn’t even known this simulacrum of Michael Poole existed.