The Curator stared at him. ‘So now we know why you have been conjured into existence, boy.’ He laughed out loud.

The clustering artificial suns swarmed out of the sky, and night fell. There were still creatures on Earth that needed a cycling of day and night, it seemed. But the dark revealed a sky crowded with stars and weapons, with misty Saturn and swollen Sol.

Symat and his party returned to the flitter. Mela shared a cabin with Symat; she went to bed and seemed to fall asleep immediately. Symat could not settle. Too much strangeness was swirling around in his head - and nothing as disturbing as the fact that he had been named after the lover of an Ascendent, a man dead a million years.

When light began to seep into the sky, he slid out of the cabin without disturbing Mela. Outside the flitter the air was cool, but so dry there was no dew. The light was still an empty grey, and the dawn was complex, cast by multiple suns that swarmed restlessly over the horizon.

Luru Parz was standing in the shadow of the flitter’s wing, a silent pillar watching him.

‘I couldn’t sleep,’ he said.

She shrugged. ‘You’re young. You’ll survive . . . Look.’

Peering into the half-light, Symat saw movement. The dark shapes were animals, a herd shifting slowly across the plain beyond the city. One animal, younger, broke away from the rest, and he saw its silhouette more clearly. He counted two, four, six legs.

Luru said, ‘Interesting, isn’t it? This planet was the capital of a Galactic empire. Now most of it is abandoned and gone wild.’

‘I never saw an animal with six legs.’

‘I believe they are called “spindlings”. They are not native to Earth. And look at this.’ She walked a few paces away from the flitter to a patch of grass.

Symat bent down and ruffled the grass with his fingers. It was dry as a bone, but it was alive, adapted to the aridity. And as the light lifted a little more he saw that among the green blades was some kind of fibrous growth, deep black.

‘The green grass is probably native: there are lots of ways to exploit sunlight for energy, but using green chlorophyll is quite rare. Something to do with the spectrum of our sun, no doubt, before its modification by the photino birds. But that black mat is not a native, any more than a spindling. And - there!’ Luru pointed, almost eagerly. ‘See that?’

Symat saw a small shape moving through the miniature jungle of the grass. It had a silvered carapace, and he thought it might be a beetle. But then light speckled between its jaws.

‘Laser light?’

‘It’s descended from tiny machines designed to crop the grass. Now it follows its own evolutionary agenda. If you turn them out into the wild, even machines evolve, Symat.’