‘Sure.’ Poole waved a hand. ‘But these are exceptions. You can’t deny the basic fact that the Coalition froze human evolution, for the vast bulk of mankind, on epic scales of space and time. And by doing so, they won their war. Which was when the trouble really started.’

The heirs of the Coalition were if anything even more fanatical about their ideology and purpose than their predecessors had ever been. They had called themselves the Ideocracy, precisely to emphasise the supremacy of the ideas which had won a Galaxy, but of which everybody else had temporarily lost sight.

In their conclaves the Ideocrats sought a new strategy. Now that the old threat had been vanquished, nobody needed the Coalition any more. Perhaps, therefore, the Ideocrats dreamed cynically, a conjuring-up of future threats might be enough to frighten a scattered humanity back into the fold, where they would be brought once more under a single command - that is, under the Ideocrats’ command - just as in the good old days. Whether those potential threats ever came to pass or not was academic. The cause was the thing, noble in itself.

The Ideocrats’ attention focused on Chandra, centre of the Galaxy and ultimate symbol of the war. The great black hole had once been used as a military resource by the foe of mankind. What if now a human force could somehow occupy Chandra? It would be a hedge against any future return by the Xeelee - and would be a constant reminder to all mankind of the threat against which the Ideocracy’s predecessor had fought so long, and on which even now the Ideocracy was focused. A greater rallying cry could hardly be imagined; Ideocracy strategists imagined an applauding mankind returning gratefully to its jurisdiction once more.

But how do you send people into a black hole? Eventually a way was found. ‘But,’ Poole said, ‘they had to break their own rules . . .’

Far from resisting human evolution, the Ideocrats now ordered that deliberate modifications of mankind be made: that specifically designed post-humans be engineered to be injected into new environments. ‘In this case,’ Poole said, ‘the tenuous atmosphere of a black hole.’

‘It’s impossible,’ said Captain Tahget, bluntly disbelieving. ‘There’s no way a human could live off wisps of superheated plasma, however you modified her.’

‘Not a human, but a post-human,’ Michael Poole said testily. ‘Have you never heard of pantropy, Captain? This is your age, not mine! Evolution is in your hands now; it has been for millennia. You don’t have to think small: a few tweaks to the bone structure here, a bigger forebrain there. You can go much further than that. I myself am an example.