The Ideocrats, comparative masters when it came to dominating their fellow humans, had no experience in dealing with post-humans. They had no idea how to enforce discipline and loyalty over creatures to whom ‘real’ humans might seem as alien as a fly to a fish. So they took precautions. Each candidate pantropic was born as a fully biological human, from a mother’s womb, and each spent her first fifteen years living a normal a life - normal, given she had been born on a tent-world in orbit around a black hole.

‘Then, on her sixteenth birthday, Sharn was taken,’ Mara said. ‘And she was copied.’

‘Like making a Virtual,’ Poole mused. ‘The copying must have been a quantum process. And the data was injected into the plasma structures in the black hole atmosphere.’ He grinned. ‘You can’t fault the Ideocrats for not thinking big! And that’s why there are people here in the first place - I mean, a colony with families - so that these wretched exiles would have a grounding in humanity, and stay loyal. Ingenious.’

‘It sounds horribly manipulative,’ said Futurity.

‘Yes. Obey us or your family gets it . . .’

Mara said, ‘We knew we were going to lose her, from the day Sharn was born. We knew it would be hard. But we knew our duty. Anyhow we weren’t really losing her. We would always have her, up there in the sky.’

‘I don’t understand,’ groused the Captain. ‘After your daughter was “copied”, why didn’t she just walk out of the copying booth?’

‘Because quantum information can’t be cloned, Captain,’ Poole said gently. ‘If you make a copy you have to destroy the original. Which is why young Futurity’s superiors were so agitated when I was transferred into this ship’s data store: there is only ever one copy of me. Sharn could never have walked out of that booth. She had been destroyed in the process.’

Futurity gazed out at the wispy black hole air. ‘Then - if this is all true - somewhere in those wisps is your daughter. The only copy of your daughter.’

Poole said, ‘In a deep philosophical sense, that’s true. It really is her daughter, rendered in light.’

Futurity said, ‘Can she speak to you?’

‘It was never allowed,’ Mara said wistfully. ‘Only the commanders had access, on secure channels. I must say I found that hard. I don’t even know how she feels. Is she in pain? What does it feel like to be her now?’

‘How sad,’ Poole said. ‘You have your duty - to colonise a new world, the strange air of the black hole. But you can’t go there; instead you have to lose your children to it. You are transitional, belonging neither to your ancestors’ world or your children’s. You are stranded between worlds.’