“Charen Volkovska,” Rove agreed. “Useless to us now, unfortunately. She’s done her bit, and I suspect the sudden disconnection was too much for her. We’ll see if she can be recovered, but I suspect we’ll end up having to switch her off.”

“Disconnection from the ice thing?”

“From that and everything else, yes. Hard to go back to being one person when you’ve had your head spread across multiple worlds for years.” He shrugged, and Lucas saw the iota of regret he felt over Charen Volkovska winking out of existence. “In the end, both she and her ice god were…good computers, really. They’d do anything you told them to, irrespective of personal cost.”

Lucas took a deep breath. He had to ask, now, to confirm his suspicions, but at the same time he found himself unwilling to take that final step. If he didn’t ask, then he could go on pretending he didn’t know.

And yet: “So what did she do? What did you get her to do?”

“We took the calculations that our erstwhile fellows, Khan and the rest, cooked up, and adapted them a little. Charen thought they wouldn’t have worked anyway, in their original form. What we’ve done is save the universe, Lucas. Or the bit of the universe that could be saved. Rather than trying to shore up the whole overpopulated mess of it all, we’ve saved what was important to us, turned those fields and equations inward to shore up this single parallel. Which was easier, believe me, than trying to keep the overstrained edifice standing. This is it, now, Lucas: this one world is all that remains, as of the moment when Charen decanted us into the forest. The rest has gone, save for that dead origin world we were in. Probably Khan and the rest are still floating about in their ridiculous insect boat there, trying to work out what went wrong. But we’ll never see them again.”

“So Earth, real Earth, our Earth…” Lucas did not trust himself to go on. His imagination kept throwing up things like game shows, bookmakers, lager, street lamps, chips, all of them gone, winking out of existence with the rest of the world.

“All is not lost, Lucas,” Rove told him. “In a very real sense, all is not lost. Do you really think I would go to all this trouble just to play frontiersman in some primordial wilderness?”

If the uniforms were crisp enough, yes. But Lucas said nothing. Rove was patently in one of his expansive moods, eager to demonstrate how clever he’d been.

“They should have the helicopter refuelled by now,” he said. “Let’s go for a jaunt. We’ll have to be careful of reserves after that, but I think we can indulge ourselves this once.”