Futurity watched the scene in Tahget’s fish-tank Virtual viewer. Mara’s cabin looked just as it had before: the woman sitting patiently on the bed, the dresser, and the bomb sitting on the floor, grotesquely out of place. All that was different was a tray on top of the dresser with the remains of a meal.

Poole appeared out of nowhere, a little manikin figure in the fish-tank. Mara sat as if frozen.

Poole leaned down, resting his hands on his knees, and looked into her face. ‘You’re exhausted. Your eyes are pissholes in the snow.’ Nobody in Tahget’s office had ever seen snow; the translation routines had to interpret.

Poole snapped his fingers to conjure up a Virtual chair and sat down. Mara bowed down before him. ‘Take it easy,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to dry my feet with your hair.’ Another archaic reference Futurity didn’t understand. ‘I know I’m tangled up in your myths. But I’m just a man. Actually, not even that.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Mara said thickly, straightening up.

‘For what? You’re the real person here, with the real problem. ’ He glanced at the sullen mass of the bomb.

Mara said, ‘I made them bring you here. Now I don’t know what to say to you.’

‘Just talk. I don’t think anybody understands what you want, Mara. Not even that bright kid Futurity.’

‘Who? Oh, the acolyte. I told them, but they didn’t listen.’

‘Then tell me.’ He laughed. ‘I’m the sleeping beauty. Lethe knows I’ve got no preconceptions.’

‘I want to go home. I didn’t want to leave in the first place. They evacuated us by force.’

He leaned forward. ‘Who did?’

‘The troops of the new Kard.’

‘Who . . . ? Never mind; I’ll figure that out. OK. But home for you is a planetoid orbiting a black hole. Yes? A satellite black hole, born in the accretion disc of the monster at the heart of the Galaxy.’ He rubbed his chin. ‘Quite a place to visit. But who would want to live there?’

Mara sat up straighter. ‘I would. I was born there.’

It had been a project of the first years after mankind’s victory in the centre of the Galaxy, Mara told him. With the war won, the ancient Coalition, the government of a united mankind, abruptly crumbled, and successor states emerged across the Galaxy. A rump remnant of the Coalition that called itself the Ideocracy had clung on to Earth and other scattered territories. And at the Core, the scene of mankind’s greatest victory, a new project was begun. Ideocrat engineers had gathered asteroids and ice moons which they had set spinning in orbit around the satellite black holes which studded Chandra’s accretion disc. One such was the rock Mara called Greyworld.

‘You say you were born there?’

‘Yes,’ Mara said. ‘And my parents, and their parents before them.’