But even then, of course, the Book of Truth stood alone, as the one that had made sense throughout.

That the Zihdren had turned out to be not quite so important, and not unique, as the book implied, made little difference. Because another thing that you learned was that everybody had their own point of view; all species and civilisations saw things from their own perspective – and with themselves, generally, naturally, at the centre of things. The Gzilt were in one sense no different, and in another were rather better off, more justified in their self-regard, because they had had less to repudiate, less baggage to renounce; their holy book had little to apologise for.

“A lie?” she heard herself saying.

“Not just a misinterpretation or a good deed or helping hand taken too far: an outright, deliberate lie, coated with a selection of scientific truths to make it easier to swallow, but otherwise fashioned purely to deceive,” Reikl told her.

“By the Zihdren?”

“By the Zihdren,” Reikl confirmed. “In fact, by a tiny faction within the Zihdren: a solitary university faculty, a small renegade research team with a single dissident individual at its head. We are, and always have been since the Book was put together, an experiment, Ms Cossont. The Scribe was just a clever man down on his luck with a gift for speculation, embroidery and marketing. He was selected by the Zihdren – profiled, chosen – and then given the basis of the Book. The rest, of course, he just made up.

“We know all this because there was a Zihdren-Remnanter ship on its way to Zyse and the parliament for the final ceremonies. It was carrying a … an android, some sort of humanoid entity that was to represent the Zihdren at the ceremonies, but it was also supposed to confess all this deception to the political high-ups just before Subliming, so that technically the confession would have been made and the Zihdren’s revelation would have been delivered, but too late – you’d assume, they were assuming – to make any difference, and not for general consumption, of course. The political establishment is more locked into the whole Subliming idea than anybody else; they might be a little shocked, dazed even, to have confirmed what cynics and apostates have been muttering for millennia, but they would never call off the whole Subliming or think to put it to a vote or a plebiscite.”

The general smiled. It was not a convincing expression. “Only, the Zihdren ship never arrived at Zyse. It was intercepted by a Gzilt ship en route, and destroyed on some pretext,” she said. “Just before it was incinerated the Zihdren ship tried to reason with the Gzilt craft by explaining how important its mission was. It released the sealed information it was carrying. Until that point we believe it hadn’t known itself what the message contained. It was destroyed anyway and a component of the Gzilt ship loyal to something beyond the regiment it belonged to ensured the information duly made its way to us.”