Poole was glued to the window. ‘Astounding,’ he said. ‘The black hole is a flaw in the cosmos, into which a Galaxy is draining. And this accretion disc is a sink as wide as Sol system!’

It was Mara who noticed the moistness on Poole’s cheeks. ‘You’re weeping.’

He turned his head away, annoyed. ‘Virtuals don’t weep,’ he said gruffly.

‘You’re not sad. You’re happy,’ Mara said.

‘And Virtuals don’t get happy,’ Poole said. ‘It’s just - to be here, to see this!’ He turned on Futurity, who saw anger beneath his exhilaration, even a kind of despair, powerful emotions mixed up together. ‘But you know what’s driving me crazy? I’m not him. I’m not Poole. It’s as if you woke me up to torture me with existential doubt! He never saw this - and whatever I am, he is long gone, and I can’t share it with him. So it’s meaningless, isn’t it?’

Futurity pondered that. ‘Then appreciate it for yourself. This is your moment, not his. Relish how this enhances your own identity - yours, uniquely, not his.’

Poole snorted. ‘A typical priest’s answer!’ But he fell silent, and seemed a little calmer. Futurity thought he might, for once, have given Poole a little comfort.

Tahget said grimly, ‘Before you get too dewy-eyed, remember this was a war zone.’ He told Poole how Chandra had once been surrounded by technology, a net-like coating put in place by beings who had corralled a supermassive black hole and put it to work. ‘The whole set-up took a lot of destroying,’ Tahget said evenly. ‘When we’d finished that job, we’d won the Galaxy.’

Poole stared at him. ‘You new generations are a formidable bunch.’

There were stars in the accretion disc. Tahget pointed them out.

The disc was a turbulent place, where eddies and knots with the mass of many suns could form - and, here and there, collapse, compress and spark into fusion fire. These stars shone like jewels in the murky debris at the rim of the disc. But doomed they were, as haplessly drawn towards Chandra as the rest of the disc debris from which they were born. Eventually the most massive star would be torn apart, its own gravity no match for the tides of Chandra. Sometimes you would see a smear of light brushed across the face of the disc: the remains of a star, flensed and gutted, its material still glowing with fusion light.

Some stars didn’t last even that long. Massive, bloated, these monsters would burst as supernovas almost as soon as they formed, leaving behind remnants: neutron stars - or even black holes, stellar-mass objects. Even Chandra couldn’t break open a black hole, but it would gobble up these babies with relish. When a black hole hit Chandra, so it was said, that immense event horizon would ring like a bell.