Mara said, ‘I will be with you at Timelike Infinity, Michael Poole, when this burden will pass.’

That was a standard Wignerian prayer. Poole said gently, ‘Yes. Perhaps I’ll see you there, Mara. Who knows?’ He nodded to Futurity. ‘Goodbye, engineer. Remember - open mind.’

‘Open mind,’ Futurity said softly.

Poole turned, leapt away from the ship, and vanished in a shimmering of pixels.

After that, Futurity spent long hours studying the evanescent patterns in the air of the black hole. He tried to convince himself he could see more structure: new textures, a deeper richness. Perhaps Michael Poole really was in there, with Sharn. Or perhaps Michael Poole had already gone on to his next destination, or the next after that. It was impossible to tell.

He gave up, turned to his data desk, and began to work out how he was going to explain all this to the Hierocrat.

With the Shipbuilders swarming through their corridors and access tubes, the ship lifted out of the accretion disc of Chandra, and sailed for Base 478, and then for Earth.

In the end the Ideocracy and the Kardish Imperium inevitably fell on each other.

Such wars of succession consumed millennia and countless lives. It was not a noble age, though it threw up plenty of heroes.

But time exerted its power. The wars burned themselves out. Soon the Coalition with all its works and its legacies was forgotten.

As for the Wignerian religion, it developed into the mightiest and deepest of all mankind’s religions, and brought consolation to trillions. But in another moment it too was quite forgotten.

And humans, flung upon a million alien shores, morphed and adapted.

This was the Bifurcation of Mankind. How it would have horrified that dry old stick Hama Druz! There were still wars, of course. But now different human species confronted each other, and a fundamental xenophobia fuelled genocides.

As poor Rusel on the Mayflower II had understood, human destiny works itself out on overlapping timescales. An empire typically lasts a thousand years - the Coalition was a pathology. A religion may linger five or ten thousand years. Even a human subspecies will alter unrecognisably after fifty or a hundred thousand years. So on the longest of timescales human history is a complex dissonance, with notes sounding at a multitude of frequencies from the purposeful to the evolutionary, and only the broadest patterns are discernible in its fractal churning.

You learn this if you live long enough, like Rusel, like me.

The age of Bifurcation ended abruptly.

Sixty-five thousand years after the conquest of the Galaxy, genetic randomness threw up a new conqueror. Charismatic, monstrous, carelessly spending human life on a vast scale, the self-styled Unifier used one human type as a weapon against another, before one of his many enemies took his life, and his empire disintegrated, evanescent as all those before.