The Curator stepped forward and grabbed her arm, one Virtual handling another. ‘Ascendent. Show yourself. Leave this child alone.’

Mela spasmed, and her eyes rolled up in their sockets, showing white. She blurred briefly and broke up into a rough sculpture of blocky pixels. Then Mela stumbled backwards, reforming as she emerged from the cloud of pixels.

And from that mist of light a new figure coalesced. Suddenly there were four of them, and the flitter’s tiny cabin seemed very crowded.

The newcomer was a woman, dressed in a brown robe as drab as the Curator’s. Small, dark, her face was smooth - but Symat immediately saw that the smoothness was a sign of great age.

Black eyes fixed on Symat.

‘Ascendent One,’ the Curator breathed.

‘You can’t be Luru,’ Symat said immediately. ‘I saw her. She’s a dried-out skeleton. She could barely move.’

‘I’m a projection,’ the new Virtual said, unfazed. ‘I am as she was long ago. And my sentience overlaps with hers, though time-shifted.’

The Curator sounded uneasy. ‘Most of the Ascendents are conscious only briefly each day. It will take Luru, the real one, a long time to live through this Virtual’s experiences. But she has time, of course.’

‘Her will is mine,’ said the Virtual. ‘When I speak, she speaks. Remember that.’

Symat felt deeply disturbed. To see Mela split into two and give birth to this monstrous form was an unwelcome reminder of how strange all these Virtual creatures were, how inhuman - and how interconnected, their identities somehow flowing one into another. He gathered his defiance into a knot. ‘You told me the Guardians won’t listen to you.’

Luru eyed him. ‘They’ll listen to you, though.’

Symat felt the universe pivot around him, as if the Guardians’ strange cosmic weapons had been turned on him. ‘Me? I could command the Guardians?’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘That’s why we bred you.’ She stepped closer to him and he thought he could smell her, a dry scent like a musty library. ‘I’ll show you,’ she said. ‘Come to Earth.’

V

So Symat’s strange odyssey ended on Earth, the planet of his most remote ancestors.

There was an Earth in Symat’s head, mistily imagined, a world of water and life, of blue and green. It had been taken out of Mars’s sky long ago, many generations before he had been born, and sent on its way to Saturn. It wasn’t something you talked about, the loss of the home world.

But the Earth that came looming out of the outer-system cold was not like that story-book vision. The mountains were worn down, and the sea floors were rimmed by banks of salt, drained save for dark remnant puddles. The air seemed thin, supporting only wispy traces of cloud. And though a few cities still glittered, the ground of Earth shone brick red, the red of Mars, of rust and lifelessness.