Poole stared at her. Then, in Futurity’s view, Poole’s little figure walked to the edge of the fish-tank viewer, and stared up challengingly. ‘Hey, acolyte. Help me out here. I’m having a little trouble with timescales.’

Futurity checked his data desk. Under the Ideocracy, these accretion-disc colonies had been in place for two thousand years, almost since the final victory at the Galaxy’s Core.

Poole, a man of the fourth millennium, seemed stunned. ‘Two thousand years? ’

Captain Tahget leaned forward and peered into the fish-tank. ‘Virtual, we once fought a war that spanned tens of thousands of light years. We learned to plan on a comparable scale in time. During the war there were single battles which lasted millennia.’

Poole shook his head. ‘And I imagined I thought big. I really have fallen far into the future, haven’t I?’

‘You really have, sir,’ Futurity said.

Poole sat down again and faced Mara. ‘I can see why you didn’t want to leave. Your roots were deep, on your Greyworld.’

‘Time was running out,’ she said. ‘We knew that. Our black hole was slowly spiralling deeper into Chandra’s accretion disc. Soon the turbulence, the energy density, the tides - it would have been impossible for us to hang on.’

‘Although,’ said Poole, ’the black hole itself will sail on regardless until it reaches Chandra’s event horizon.’

‘Yes.’

Poole said, ‘I still don’t understand. If you knew your world was doomed, you must have accepted you had to evacuate.’

‘Of course.’

‘Then what—’

‘I just didn’t like the way it was done.’ Her face worked, deep emotions swirling under a veneer of control. ‘I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye.’

‘Who to?’

‘Sharn. My daughter.’

Poole studied her for a moment. Then he said gently, ‘You see, you’re losing me again, Mara. I’m sorry. According to the ship’s manifest you don’t have a daughter.’

‘I did have one. She was taken away from me.’

‘Who by?’

‘The Ideocrats.’

‘But you see, Mara, there’s my problem. I saw the records. Once the evacuation was done, there was nobody left on Greyworld. So your daughter—’

‘She wasn’t on Greyworld.’

‘Then where?’

‘She lives in the satellite black hole,’ Mara said simply. ‘Where the Ideocrats sent her.’

‘In the black hole?’

‘She lives in it, as you, Michael Poole, live in light.’

‘As some kind of Virtual representation?’

Mara shook her head. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t explain it better. We aren’t scientists on Greyworld, like you.’

He thought that over. ‘Then what are you?’

‘We are farmers.’ She shrugged. ‘Some of us are technicians. We supervise the machines that tend other machines, that keep the air clean and the water flowing.’

Poole asked, ‘But why are you there in the first place, Mara? What did the Ideocracy intend? What is your duty?’