Tahget listened to this contemptuously. ‘Evidently neither of you has been around black holes much.’ He pointed to the image of the accretion disc. ‘The hole’s magnetic field pulls material out of the disc, and hurls it into these wider shells. We call the outer layers the corona.’

Futurity said, ‘A star’s outer atmosphere is also a corona.’

‘Well done,’ said Tahget dryly. ‘The gas shells around black holes and stars are created by similar processes. Same physics, same name.’

Poole said, ‘And the magnetic field pumps energy into these layers. Futurity, look at this temperature profile!’

‘Yes,’ said Tahget. ‘In the accretion disc you might get temperatures in the millions of degrees. In the inner corona’ - the eye’s ‘iris’ - ‘the temperatures will be ten times hotter than that, and in the outer layers ten times hotter again.’

‘But the magnetic field of a spinning black hole and its accretion disc isn’t simple,’ Poole said. ‘It won’t be just energy that the field pumps in, but complexity.’ He was becoming more expert with the data desk now. He picked out a section of the inner corona, and zoomed in. ‘What do you make of that, Futurity?’

The acolyte saw wisps of light, ropes of denser material in the turbulent gases, intertwined, slowly writhing. They were like ghosts, driven by the complex magnetic fields, and yet, Futurity immediately thought, they had a certain autonomy. Ghosts, dancing in the atmosphere of a black hole! He laughed with helpless delight.

Poole grinned. ‘I think we just found our structure.’

Mara was smiling. ‘I told you,’ she said. ‘And that’s where my daughter is.’

VIII

It took a detailed examination of the structures in the black hole air, a cross-examination of Mara, input from the experienced Captain Tahget, and some assiduous searching of the ship’s data stores - together with some extremely creative interpolation by Michael Poole - before they had a tentative hypothesis to fit the facts about what had happened here.

Like so much else about this modern age, it had come out of the death of the Interim Coalition of Governance.

Poole said, ‘Breed, fight hard, die young, and stay human: you could sum up the Coalition’s philosophy in those few words. In its social engineering the Coalition set up a positive feedback process; it unleashed a swarm of fast-breeding humans across the Galaxy, until every star system had been filled.’ Poole grinned. ‘Not a noble way to do it, but it worked. And we did stay human, for twenty thousand years. Evolution postponed!’

‘It wasn’t as simple as that,’ Futurity cautioned. ‘Perhaps it couldn’t have been. The Shipbuilders slid through the cracks. There were even rumours of divergences among the soldiers of the front lines, as they adapted to the pressures of millennia of war.’