

Omega Dawning

by David Villa

Copyright 2020 David Villa

Smashwords Edition

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my thanks to Max Pashley who reviewed an early draft of the book and made many helpful suggestions, as well as pointing out a number of errors, both minor and not so minor. The book is the better for his efforts. Remaining errors are mine alone.

Preface

On the issue of extraterrestrial life Sir Arthur C. Clarke once observed that either it exists or it doesn't, and both possibilities are terrifying. One of the most profound and ancient questions the human race has asked - can ask - is: are we alone? And as of this moment in our history we still have no idea what the answer is. There is not the slightest evidence that any kind of life, even simple bacteria, exists anywhere in the universe other than the single planet that is our home. For the case of simple bacteria, and even some more complex organisms, we should not expect evidence at the present time, even if such life is commonplace among the stars. We have only just begun to explore the universe beyond our doorstep, and the amount of it we have so far explored with anything like the resolution needed to gather evidence for this kind of life is infinitesimal compared to the whole.

The story is different for advanced technological life - the kind of life human civilisation can expect to become within a relatively short space of time. Here we do have evidence - or at least a lack of it under circumstances where evidence might be expected if that sort of life existed. This is what has come to be called the Fermi Paradox or the Fermi Question \- named for the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi who, ostensibly, first posed it in the 1950s : Why do we not see signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life when, if it existed, we should? Or more simply: Where are they?

Many answers to this question have been proposed. Perhaps advanced civilisations universally hide themselves, or cease any activity that might be visible across the distances that separate the stars. Or perhaps we have overestimated our own ability to see or to recognise such activity where we ourselves have not initiated it. But probably the simplest, most obvious and most plausible answer to Fermi's question is that, for whatever reason, technologically advanced intelligent life - life broadly like ourselves in the relevant respects - is exceedingly rare.

Rare, however, does not necessarily mean unique, and for those for whom the prospect of us occupying the vast universe entirely and permanently alone is truly terrifying, there is still hope that, somewhere, a neighbour is waiting to introduce itself to us.

The literature and cinema of Science Fiction is replete with stories describing such an introduction - when and where it might happen, how it might proceed and what consequences might follow from it. Sometimes the first encounter is marred by violence and aggression, such as H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds", other times it is gentler and friendlier, such a Steven Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". Sometimes extraterrestrials reach out to us, for example in the 1951 film "The Day the Earth Stood Still", other times we are expected to go to them, as in Carl Sagan's "Contact". Sometimes the first encounter is thought to have taken place long ago, as with Arthur C. Clarke's own "2001: A Space Odyssey", other times it does not occur until one party is long gone, such as in the 1956 film "Forbidden Planet". For the sake of narrative flow, works of this genre frequently downplay - or entirely ignore - difficulties that the laws of physics, such as the finitude of the speed of light, would have for the plot, and the ramifications of the Fermi Paradox rarely get a mention.

In the pages that follow I present yet another scenario describing a possible way the event in question could unfold - one which, in my opinion, is especially plausible given the constraints imposed by our present understanding of the laws of nature and the potential implications of Fermi's question. The story is presented in the nature of a sequel to my previous novella, "Waiting for Omega" (2016), which sets the stage and supplies some clarifying details, though the careful reader should be able to infer the missing elements from the sequel alone.

It is a hopeful and optimistic tale which affirms the inestimable value of the human species in a vast and expanding cosmos, in the light of what will be the most momentous event in all of history.

David Villa

Sydney, 2020

Omega Dawning

"In the beginning...

God ..." (Gen 1:1)

Prologue

All that was, all that had ever been, was pain. Searing, unbounded, indescribable pain. Indescribable not just because of its intensity. There was no reference by which it could be described. Unremitting, unvarying pain. There were no factors through which it could vary. There was nothing else. There was only pain.

Then something else. Something to surround the pain, to contain it. To own it. Consciousness, a self, a mind - a person. Him. He was in pain. It did not exist without him. Could not exist without him. That was necessary - a link between two things becoming a third. Necessity. Logic. The essence of structure and form.

A primal trinity of being - pain, mind and logic.

But the pain was ... wrong. It should not have been. It was different. Different from what? A fourth thing? Imagined - dimly at first. A memory. A goal. An alternative to the pain.

Then there was darkness. Impenetrable blackness. Surrounding him on all sides - space - containing him as he contained the pain. Darkness contrasted with the memory of light. Memories forming and solidifying. Change. Time. Then more images - perhaps dreams, perhaps memories, perhaps mere fantasies - but thoughts, concepts, constructs of the mind. Not real, but potential. Suggesting a whole world of possibilities.

Then more sensations. Sensations beyond the pain. Sensations recognised only through their absence. The darkness still, and silence, and ... cold. Touch. Something solid. Something ... external.

He was awake.

"... All was without form, and void, and darkness was upon it..." (Gen 1:2)

For yet another time the man had survived his birth. For a while he tried to lie still, letting the final partitions of consciousness trickle back into his mind as if waking from a deep sleep. How many times before? Seven - no eight. Only seven he could remember. But this was different from those, disturbingly different. They had been comfortable and gentle, with subdued light and soft sheets. This was distressing and painful and dark and wet. A vague sense of dread started to close in on him, but even as it did he found himself wondering if this might be closer to the one birth he didn't recall.

There was something in his throat, filling his mouth. Instinctively he clawed at it, gagging as he pulled it free, and realising too late as he did that it had probably been feeding air into his lungs. His mouth filled with thick liquid and he struggled to push his head clear of the shallow pool in which he was lying. Gasping for air he managed to find a position in which he could cough out the last of the fluid and start to breathe with some small measure of comfort.

It was dark, very dark. For an anguished moment he wondered if something had gone wrong this time and he was blind. But no - there was light, a small patch of faint, blurred light that moved as he moved suggesting it was real and external. Not enough to see anything else, but enough to provide a point of reference. The surface he was lying on was hard and slippery, the liquid pooling across it - not water, but more like thick mucous - slimy and just lukewarm enough in enough places to feel disgustingly organic. With no friction to push against every attempt at movement left him flaying helplessly on one spot. More than that, he was being held loosely by protrusions from his abdomen and the back of his neck that tightened on some distant anchor if he managed to twist too far. He grabbed at the one in his belly, digging fingernails into its fleshy surface to gain purchase against the slime and tried to pull it out away from him. There was pain, but not so much as to overcome the feeling that this was a foreign thing that had to be removed. As it came free he realised what this was - it was his placenta, his own afterbirth that had been feeding him nourishment for however long he had been there. And the one in his neck, which he attended to next, had been doing the same thing with information - his memories, his skills, his personality - pumping his very soul into a new brain. These realisations did not diminish the relief at having them gone.

For a further moment he lay still, gathering composure, planning a next move. The light. That was where he needed to be. He inched towards it, partly swimming, partly crawling until the ground dipped ever so slightly underneath him. Then gravity took over and he began to slide.

"... Let there be light." (Gen 1:3)

-Day 1

He was lying on what felt like coarse, wet sand. Pulling himself into a sitting position he began to look around. All about him was misty and indistinct, nothing but whiteness into the indefinite distance. On top of that his eyes were blurred and unfocussed. They were filled with the amniotic mucous he had just been immersed in and also, he thought, still adjusting to a new set of pupils and lenses. But at least he could see. When he held up his hands he counted ten good fingers, albeit fuzzy ones.

He tried to stand but it took several minutes before his legs felt steady enough to bear his weight, and several more before he felt confident to take a few tentative steps. He trained each of his senses on the world around him trying to gauge where he was. The air against his skin was cool, but not cold, and there was a light breeze. Towering above him was the place from which he had just emerged. Blinking to clear his eyes he tried to take it in - a single black column, wide at the base and tapering inward before spreading back out at the top like a mushroom, its insides exposed but invisible through a dark cavernous opening. Not such a noble birth, he thought, incubated and hatched from the cap of a large black mushroom.

Beneath the sensitive soles of his feet and out as far as he could see around was sandy ground. A beach perhaps, or a desert, or just a large sand pit? There was not much else he could see, the heavy mist obscuring anything more than a few metres away from even keen vision. He could hear - water, running water - like a nearby stream. The scent, barely noticeable - earthy, like a morning in the country or spring in the mountains. Evoking old memories. Very old memories. From these sensations he could not tell if this was a moderately large cage, a gigantic habitat or the surface of a planet.

"Hello," he called out, unsure if he was even expecting an answer. He waited a few seconds. "Hello," he called again, "is anybody there?" No response. He walked around the base of the tower, feeling its texture and looking for other clues. It was mostly smooth but with the grain of rock, like basalt. The dead remains of a vine that had once been growing up the stem gave it the appearance of great age as well as a certain mystique.

He started walking towards the sound of the flowing stream, still trying to focus both mind and eyes. Seven times in the past he had woken like this, returned to life after a long period of hibernation. Each had been different in its own way, but each of those previous occasions had been in clinical, comfortable surroundings, usually with someone assigned to greet him and help guide him into an unknown world. He'd expected this time to be different. Actually, in truth he'd had no idea what to expect this time - but surely that very uncertainty would justify some assistance.

"Is anybody out there?" he called once more, halting his stride and straining his ears for a response. Still nothing.

Portia. He remembered that Portia had promised to be here. She had been the one who met him after his first big sleep, his first greeter. That was an ancient memory, a memory that had been dormant in the back of his mind until ... until just a few days ago when a series of events had called it to the front once more. But Portia was also the last person he had spoken to. That was a much more recent memory, only hours - even minutes - old, still fresh and clear in his mind. She'd said she would be with him.

But that was wrong - very wrong - an illusion. He knew that. It was a promise made far too long ago and under far too different a set of circumstances for there to be any real hope of it being kept. The realisation of that truth made him shudder.

A substantial brook emerged from the mist before him, tumbling over rocks and cutting a wide gash through the sand. Part of it slowed into a deep pool before flowing off again to his right. He knelt down and splashed water over his face and across his eyes, pausing only briefly to consider the possibility that this might not be water at all. This place was new and alien and he was a stranger here, so a degree of caution should have been the prudent attitude. But at some point he would have to take a leap of faith just as he had done countless times before, even if he was not sure in whom that faith was being placed. As if to force the point home he scooped up a palmful of water and rinsed the foul aftertaste of the birth fluid from his mouth, then another two scoops which he drank. It was fresh and sweet, his first act of consumption on this new world. Then he slid into the pool up to his chest before submerging completely to wash the drying slime from his hair and skin. The water was cold, but not uncomfortably so, and he could feel it refreshing his spirit even as it did his body.

Feeling clean and with his eyes nicely focussing, he stood for a moment at waste depth until the water calmed enough to glimpse a reflection. The stubbly chinned face looking back from the surface was not unfamiliar, but much younger and more delicate than he remembered. He judged it to be that of a youth about twenty. That would do - he would think now of himself as having been born at twenty. He had long ago stopped being surprised or even grateful at the periodic rejuvenation his body experienced. It was what his life had become. The exact circumstances under which that rejuvenation had occurred this time \- that was the more important question he was yet to face.

The ambient light filtering through the fog began to dim, and he realised he had no idea what cycles of time existed here, how long a day lasted, or how far into the day he had emerged - even whether day and night were the relevant concepts. He thought to make his way back to the tower and had just picked up his own trail of footprints and was starting along it when, over the span of only a few minutes, the light level dipped to zero. Inky darkness, total and complete. With the light went some degrees of heat, only to be replaced by a nebulous dread. If a heavy fog in an unknown land had been disconcerting, darkness on top of it was that much the worse. Almost immediately his hearing became more acute. There were sounds here above the faint trickling of water, indistinct and distant - perhaps nothing more than the wind playing with his imagination, perhaps much more. A primal, childlike fear of the dark, of what might lurk nearby and unseen within it, began to invade his mind. But there was no point trying to hide or to find somewhere safer - there was nowhere to go in the dark. He lay down where he was and tried to dig himself into the sand in a bid for some amount of warmth and comfort.

And there, half buried in the sand in an unknown world, surrounded by unidentified sounds, engulfed by cold and fear and blackness, the man very quickly and very soundly went to sleep.

-Day 2

When he woke again light had already begun to penetrate the darkness. It intensified slowly until the world became visible once more. A thick layer of cloud covered the entire sky making it difficult to judge the primary source of light, but the heavy fog of the previous day had lifted and he was now able to take in his surroundings in their entirety. In one direction the river meandered its way from left to right, cutting a swathe through coarse grained sand. The opposite bank of the river opened out into an expanse of grass and scrubby bushes, and beyond that in the distance he could make out clumps of trees, maybe the beginnings of a forest. In the other direction was nothing but gently rolling dunes of sand for as far as he could see, punctuated here and there by dead trees bleached white from wind and weather. Standing prominently by itself in the middle distance was the black mushroom shaped tower from which he had emerged the previous day. It was the only thing that had the appearance of being unnatural - the product of intelligence. For a moment he considered returning to it and trying to re-enter it in the hope of finding a clue to his next move, but he knew at this stage that would be futile. It could wait for another time.

He made his way back to the river and started walking in its direction of flow. If there was any habitation here, he reasoned, it was most likely to be found along the bank of a river and nearer to a coast. And if a coast was to be found at all it would be downstream.

As the sky brightened, even under heavy clouds, he became cognisant of his own nakedness. This was a concern not just because of the possibility of finding a community of fellow human beings with something like the cultural norms he was accustomed to. Exposed skin was a condition he had grown used to being uncomfortable with, even on cloudy days. In a previous life, one that still felt fresh in his mind, it would have led to rapid and painful sunburn. Food, too, would soon become a matter of concern, not to mention the other necessities and comforts of life. In times past all of these had been taken care of. Each of the previous times he had returned from a long hibernation, rejuvenated and repatriated into a new world or a new era, he had been given what he needed to survive. Not pampered necessarily, but at least offered the opportunity of existing for free. It was not obvious that this would be the case here. This place appeared too natural, and nature was not known to reward laziness. At least fresh water had been sorted.

He began to reason through possible scenarios that would explain the current situation in terms that he did know. He was, by all appearances, on the surface of a planet, and moreover a planet with breathable air and drinkable water and tolerable gravity. He had been in artificial habitats that could simulate these conditions and were large enough to accommodate this landscape, but there were always signs - signs in the way ground and sky met at the horizon, signs in the way the clouds moved and the wind blew, signs he was not seeing here. As if to convince himself further he picked up a handful of pebbles and threw them one by one as high and as straight into the air as he could, carefully watching their path as they fell to the ground at his feet. Coriolis forces were always a giveaway. Of course he could not be completely sure. There was still the chance that this was a habitat far larger than any he had seen before. There was also the chance that this was entirely a simulation at the level of the brain and the senses - a high fidelity trick played on his mind by nothing more than computational processes. But that sort of deception had been outlawed - forbidden by whatever powers had authority over the worlds on which he had lived as a violation of the fundamental moral imperative never to lie. Those powers had variously been called Governors or Monarchs, Ubermensch, Overlords or Gods depending on the location and the era he found himself. He had always thought them benevolent and had always been prepared to trust them. They were, after all, the descendants of humanity. They were what humankind had become as it spread out among the stars, guiding its own evolution and taking its dreams and values and the better part of its nature along with it. They were, in effect, his own people.

But the progeny of humankind might not be running this show.

The realisation hit him with a jolt, as if it had not occurred to him before. He had come into a world vastly more alien than anything he had experienced before, traversed a span of space and time that put him outside the domain of his own kind. He knew that was to be the case, it was what he had signed up for. That was the role he had accepted a long time ago, humanity's representative in a new world. Then it had been an abstraction, a distant goal, the promise of an adventure. Now it was real. He was here and this is what it looked like. And what it looked like was ... flowing streams and sandy deserts and distant trees and cloudy skies. It looked altogether normal. The fact he had arrived here at all meant that whoever was in control - his ... Hosts - were not only able but willing to accept him into their world. In return he would be willing to put his faith in them, at least until he found a reason not to. For the moment he had little choice. And at least now he had given them a name.

That's a start, he thought, as he continued walking.

The sand gave way briefly to a wide patch of grassland where a billabong had formed from the changing course of the river. Dandelions and tall rushes grew in profusion around its edges, as well as some clumps of bamboo. He sat down on the grass by the bank to splash water onto his face. A flotilla of water skimmers, alarmed at his approach, darted away across the surface - a mundane enough event on its own, but imbued here with deep significance. These were the first animals he had seen here, and they were animals from his own time and his own place, like him brought, or sent, here from their distant point of origin and accepted into a new home. Recognising that significance he attended even more closely to the little ecosystem around him - a bee inspecting a flower, a swarm of midges buzzing past his head, the chirrup of a frog or a cricket somewhere nearby. He wasn't alone after all, yet the very realisation drove home how alone he probably was.

Some large water lilies floated on the surface of the pond. They were large enough that two or three of them would cover his back and shoulders and tough enough at the edges to hold together when sewn through with grass stems. So half an hour later, somewhat protected by a makeshift poncho and hat from whatever rays might be penetrating the clouds, he continued walking.

At length the river widened into a shallow delta and the sandy dunes sloped gently down to the shore of a large body of water that stretched to the horizon in front of him and into the distance left and right, forming a prominent coast. A tiny swell produced waves no higher than his knees that lapped the beach front along its length. Either an ocean or a large lake, he thought as he waded in and sampled some of the water. Salty. More likely an ocean, though impressively calm and serene.

Still no hint of habitation in either direction.

He couldn't tell how long he had been walking to reach that spot or how long it had been since he'd woken up, but it felt longer than he should have expected a day to be. The learned rhythms of his body were telling him to prepare for nightfall, but at the same time the higher faculties of his mind were telling him that those rhythms probably no longer applied. He would have to learn new ones. Having eaten nothing for that time, indeed for the whole time he had been there, he was also feeling growing pangs of hunger. How long it had really been since his last meal was a conversation he was not yet willing to face. The best hope of securing a food source was the wooded area across the river, so he waded across at a shallow point and followed the coast to where the vegetation looked to be denser and more varied. He had reached an expanse of rocks - hard quartz and sharp volcanic glass that required careful navigation to avoid cutting his bare feet - when he became aware of the dimming sky. Remembering the rapid onset of darkness he decided to prepare a place to hunker down for the night.

The rock shelf descended onto a small hill that sloped gently down to the shore, with a series of substantial rocky overhangs at its border making ideal shelter. He gathered a quantity of leaf litter and had just arranged it into bedding when darkness fell, once again coming abruptly and totally, with very little in the way of dusk or twilight. As he listened to the sounds of the night, trying to convince himself that those he could not identify were nonetheless too distant to be of concern, he distracted himself with memories of past lives and how they might fit with the present.

Daylight, if that's what it had been, was considerably longer on this world than that of his previous home - several times longer, in fact. But then the days on that planet had been much shorter than was common among those worlds supporting human colonies - barely five hours. He had lived there for close to forty years, so he had become used to it. This one felt closer to that of his original home, at least to the extent he could remember anything about how that felt. This was just one of the many adjustments he would likely need to make as he made his way in this new world. It was a process he knew only too well. He had lived on four planets as well as several artificial habitats, and one place that was both an artificial habitat and a planet. Each had its own customs and way of life. Each had its own set of skills and body of knowledge one needed to make it a home. And each had its own name - Kruger and Aurigae and the Citadel of Orion.

Names were important. Names provided the basis for organising thoughts and memories into something more than a clutter of mental images. The first planet he had lived on, the place of his birth, was Earth, his home world and that of his entire race. The last one had also been Earth, but it was a different planet and so far from his birth world that it had taken many thousands of years to reach it, even at the speed of light. It was a habit of humans settling in the frontiers to call their planet Earth. Most of the time it didn't matter because most of those settlers knew very little about the home of their ancestors, and cared even less. For them it existed only as a vague cultural memory, little more than a legend. He was different. For him the memories were personal, if at times distant, and so he had never liked that particular habit. Yet it also made sense to remain mindful of the deep connection between each of those places - his own existence on them. So he decided that his original home world would retain the name Earth, the place he now occupied would be NewEarth, and should the need to think of it ever arise his previous home would be OldEarth.

He lay for a time wondering how any of that would help him decide what to do in the days ahead, before succumbing once more to sleep.

-Day 3

Exhausted from the exertions of the previous day, he once again slept soundly despite the cold and the general discomfort. When he emerged from the cave it was still dark, but not so dark that he could not see the contrast between ground and sky along the horizon, or the ghostly outlines of trees in the distance. The sky was still overcast, but he felt the light was concentrating over the ocean. As it brightened further he began to investigate the surroundings he had placed himself in. The cave where he had spent the night could, with some work, be made comfortable and spacious, perhaps even homely. There was drinking water nearby, and if he could locate food and other resources this could, he thought, make a suitable base camp until the true nature of his circumstances became apparent. If food could not be found those circumstances would become very uncomfortable very quickly.

When the sky had reached what he thought was its maximum light level he ventured in the direction of several groves of trees that lined the shore on the outskirts of a thickly wooded region beyond. After a few hours of considering, then rejecting, several unidentified varieties of berry as a possible food source he stumbled upon an altogether more familiar species. An apple tree.

It was with some relish that he ate through the first fruit. This was, after all, the first meal he'd had since ... He sat on the ground under the tree to consider the question. By an odd coincidence, he recalled, the last thing he had eaten was an apple - in Murroluc's Temple - on OldEarth - during the Yule feast \- surrounded by Temple clergy and others he had known there - just before he set out on the last journey he would take on that planet \- the journey that had led him here. That was barely four days ago and the memory of it was still clear. It would likely fade with time, possibly in a brief time, like a dream in the light of morning, like most of the details of his life had done. Perhaps not disappearing completely, but merging into the patchwork his mind had become. He could sense the process starting already. The memory of that last apple was starting to feel less relevant to him, even now as he bit into the next one.

Yet he knew that memory was wrong in a far more profound way. He had pushed the thought from his mind for too long, and now he would force the point. That last apple had not been mere days ago. If everything had taken place as it was meant to - and he was working on the assumption that it had - it was thirteen million years ago. At least thirteen million years - there was no way to guess how much additional time might also have elapsed. His work and life, friends and enemies, those he had feasted with just those few hours ago - not only were they gone now, the entire civilisation of which they were a part was probably now long forgotten by everyone but himself. He had felt this degree of loss before. Each time he had woken from a long stretch of time he had needed to contemplate just such an implication. But the sheer magnitude of this one dwarfed all of the others many times over. He was no longer even in the galaxy of his birth. This place - variously called Tingard, or Centaurus A, or some unmemorable catalogue descriptor - had been no more than a smudge in the field of view of a powerful telescope only days ago. Thirteen million light-years away. Now he was here, perhaps the only human being who was, perhaps the only human being ever to have left the Milky Way. For all he knew he may well have been the only human being left anywhere.

He stood up.

"Is anybody there," he called out as loudly as he could. No reply.

A spiny lizard sat in the clearing eyeing him cautiously. Another inhabitant, along with the insects and berries and apples, that had been transported with him across those vast oceans of time and space. He wondered how much more of the natural history and heritage of Earth was here also, how much of the knowledge and information that defined his place of origin other than his own memory of it had travelled here with him. That there was any at all was a comfort.

He spent the next few hours searching nearby, and located several other potential sources of food - a grove of banana trees, a coconut palm, patches of strawberries and blackberries, some potato-like tuba roots and grapes growing wild on the vine. He also added to the list of animal species - an orb weaving spider whose web he inadvertently trashed, crabs among the mangroves where the river flowed into the sea, several other kinds of lizard and a toad that he observed in the act of consuming a grasshopper.

He collected as many apples and bananas as he could carry in his hands alone and made his way back to the cave. There he began to plan ways of making the place into a comfortable, if temporary, home. With the day now stretching towards what, apparently, was its full length he realised that one of his first priorities was to learn how to make fire. Fire would enable many activities that would be useful if he needed to stay here for any length of time, preparation and cooking of food, hardening and sharpening of tools, maybe even forging of metal if it ever came to that. More immediately it would help take the edge off the dark and chill of the approaching night. He searched among the scattered rocks until he found a combination which produced a respectable spark when struck together. Next he gathered together dandelion heads, dried grass and twigs of varying sizes, even using the sharp edge of an obsidian flake to shave kindling off a larger stick, and laid them out on the ground by the cave in preparation. He then spent the better part of an hour and a half in frustration, striking the flints at different angles and in different ways over the tinder until a single spark finally took hold. It was with a sense of elation and satisfaction that he fed the growing flames with larger and larger sticks of wood until he had a substantial campfire.

By the time he had successfully started the fire the sky was beginning to show signs of the approaching nightfall. The clouds had begun to break up over the ocean revealing his first glimpse of a naked blue sky, but he barely had time to take it in before the darkness came, leaving him with nothing but the dancing orange glow of the fire.

-Day 4

The morning sky was at last free of cloud, save for a few drifting slowly overhead. Keen to watch the sunrise he positioned himself with a good view of the ocean where the crimson line of the approaching dawn gradually focussed its intensity to a single spot. As he waited he made a mental note of the crude reference by which he was now able to judge direction. In accordance with traditional compass nomenclature, the direction of the rising sun above the sea would be east, facing that the great forest on his left would be north, the sandy desert on the right would be south, and at his back the direction from which he had walked two days before was west. That would do until variations of seasons and details of orbits became apparent.

He continued to watch and wait until a small bright orange arc on the horizon marked the moment of daybreak. His first glimpse of a new sun. He could watch it for only a few seconds before its brightness forced him to shield his eyes and turn away. That was almost as much due to habit as it was to actual discomfort at the intensity of the light. The last sunrise he had seen - on his last home, on OldEarth - would not have afforded even that long a look. That sun was small and sharp but very intense and would be fully exposed within seconds with the aid of a rapidly spinning world. The memories of that life were still fresh - it felt like only days ago he had been living it. Yet even as he turned aside from the glare he could tell that this sun was not like that. This one was larger and softer and took several minutes before its full disk was visible. He could recall its like from much deeper in the recesses of his mind. It was, when he forced his mind back, much more like Sol, the sun that had shone over Earth - the planet of his birth. For a moment the memory of sunrise on Earth displaced more recent recollections, drawing him back through decades, through centuries of time to the last time he had seen it, or indeed anything like it. That image had not been so clear to his thoughts for longer than he cared to contemplate. Sitting atop the cliffs of Dover watching the sun appear over the English Channel just as it was appearing now over this alien sea. Within hours he would be making the final preparations to leave Earth for good. The choice had been a deliberate one, made with full knowledge of what it meant, but was no less emotional for that. He'd forced himself to suppress as much of that emotion as he could for the sake of a smooth transition to a new life, pushing aside anything that might make him regret the decision. Now it seemed circumstance had pulled those memories to the surface once more. So vivid were they that a thought began to form in his mind, starting as a question and expanding rapidly to a doubt that was not easily shaken off. A sun like Earth's sun, lighting a day the duration of Earth's day, with air and water and plants and animals just like those of Earth. Might it be that his expected purpose had been abandoned after all? Was it possible that instead of being thrown further into the unknown universe than any other human being, he had simply been returned home? He resolved to avoid drawing any conclusions too hastily, one way or the other, until more facts were at hand.

Feeling an instinctive urge to escape the direct daylight he started back towards the shelter of the cave. It was then that he noticed it, sitting on the ground not far from the cave entrance - a plain white block, no larger than his foot, perfectly proportioned with smooth faces and straight edges. He stood staring at it in astonishment for well over a minute before approaching any closer, trying to think if he could have missed seeing it in the pre-dawn gloom. It had certainly not been there the previous day when he was rummaging around for firewood. It could scarcely have been more obvious had it been illuminated by neon signs. With the exception of the incubation tower he'd emerged from, it was the only thing he had seen since arriving here that looked even remotely unnatural. He cautiously poked it a few times with a stick before daring to touch it with his hands and finally picking it up. It was light and felt flimsy in has hands - even as he turned it over to examine it the untextured faces and corners began to flake away and fall to the ground in a fine powder, as if it was made of nothing more than loosely packed chalk dust. As it crumbled under his touch he felt a jolt of recognition - he had seen this stuff before, or something very like it. On Aurigae, on Kruger long ago, even on Earth he had seen it. This was the sign of manufacturing being carried out at the smallest of physical scales. Variously called smart matter, or meta matter, or nanotechnology, or angelflesh, it was the scaffolding left behind by vast armies of infinitesimal machines as they stitched atoms together one at a time to create whatever was the will of the agents that controlled them.

He brushed off the remnants of the white powder as it revealed a darker, more solid item hidden within. It was a small pouch made of some kind of thick fabric and embossed with an abstract motif that meant nothing to him. The pouch was divided into several smaller compartments, one of which held a serrated metal rod and a rectangular piece of what looked like stone. Having a vague suspicion of what this might be he struck the metal bar against the stone and watched as a shower of fine sparks leapt out and drifted all the way to his feet. A tinder box. He had been given a simple means of making fire. He tested the flint striker and found that with the right kindling he was able to start a fire as easily as if he'd been given a box of matches.

The implications of this find were clear enough. He was being observed, by someone not willing to make themselves overtly known but also not averse to intervening if they chose to. Nor were they malevolent, but the realisation made him feel uneasy.

Is that what this is, he thought, some kind of zoo?

The next several hours were spent shoring up the cave and making it a liveable shelter. He gathered long straight sticks of wood, including some fallen bamboo and dug them as best he could into the ground at the entrance, creating a walled off region that would, he felt, provide some measure of protection from the night draft and whatever visitors from the forest might roam about in the dark. He cleared a space for sleeping and lined it with as much soft leaf and grass matter as he could find and dug as deep a pit as he could at a respectable distance to use as a latrine. As the sun passed through its zenith he noticed its high point was directly overhead, shrinking the entirety of his shadow when standing upright to a small dark puddle beneath his feet, a further clue placing him in the equivalent of the tropical zone of this planet.

The afternoon sky was now completely cloudless and had the rich blue colour that he could remember a sky should have. Sitting in the shade of his newly fortified shelter eating a light meal of the fruit he had gathered he began to consider his next moves. It was clear he would need more suitable clothing, a more reliable and varied source of food and water, and a plan to explore this new environment more extensively. He also wanted to record the passage of time - at the very least, to start with, to track the days and whatever other cycles might be in place on this world. Using a piece of sharp stone on a particularly smooth and straight length of thick tree branch he painstakingly gouged four deep notches. Four days here already.

With the afternoon sun sinking in a clear sky towards what he had now labelled the west, he felt an especially keen desire to observe the nighttime sky for the first time. A careful examination of that sky might be enough to answer some questions, and there was still the prospect this would be, just possibly, the first time the stars of a new galaxy would be seen from within by an unaided human eye. For all of human history, including his own long life in the vastly different locations he had found himself, stars had been the connection that linked that small localised species with the larger universe. Now he was to be, very probably, the first of that species - quite possibly the first of any species - to have travelled so far from the place of their birth and to make that connection from the other side. He positioned himself on the high rock rooftop above his cave and waited.

The sun dipped beneath the low lying hills in that direction leaving a crimson outline behind them in its wake. The dusk lasted only a few minutes and then it was gone. With a swiftness that was easily perceptible the entire sky from horizon to horizon faded to black - as if a great cosmic light switch had been turned off. If the abruptness of that sunset startled him, what he saw next did so even more. There were no stars. None. The grand vista of the brand new galaxy he had journeyed so far to see was not there. The night was every bit as blank of celestial scenery when clear as it was when cloudy.

As his eyes acclimatised to the dark he began to fancy he could discern fuzzy patches at the very limit of perception against the pitch black background. They were very few and so faint he was not convinced they were anything other than illusions brought on by his visual system struggling to see what his mind knew should exist. Nothing like the glorious spectacle he had known on every other world.

"Where are all the stars?" he asked out loud. What is this place, he thought, with no beauty in the night sky?

It was more than merely disappointing, it was seriously disconcerting. He was suddenly even more aware of his own solitude than he had been previously - it was as if the universe itself had abandoned him. If anything was to convince him, in spite of the blue sky and the Earth-like daylight and the familiar plants and animals, that this was a totally alien world, it was that starless sky.

He sat for a while contemplating that naked sky and what it could mean. The stark contrast it offered to the natural appearance of the rest of this world was singularly disturbing. It made the whole environment appear ... fake. He was more than amply aware, of course, that this land was a construct, modelled off his home world by as yet unidentified intelligence - the Hosts. But the absence of stars created the sense that this model was flawed at a much deeper level, as if carelessly exposing a fraud. That's what it looked like - a fraud. It raised once more for him the possibility that his present situation was not just a construction, but a deception. A lie. A gift made for his benefit was one thing, but a lie imposed on him was something entirely different.

"Mind is a rare and valuable gift which must not be abused," he heard himself mutter as if in consolation. "The purpose of mind is to know truth. To create deception is abuse of the mind."

The words were not his.

They belonged to a woman he had known, long ago. Her name was Szohnjah, as best he could pronounce it, though he invariably got the pronunciation wrong which, ironically, was the only reason he could remember it at all. She had been a neighbour of his among the orbiting mansions of Aurigae. She was a sort of priestess, and a sort of lawyer - an expert in relations between the human and the transhuman, and the legal and moral underpinnings of those relations, at a time when that was something one could be.

"Minds are built to crave truth, but they are also fragile and easily deceived," she would say. "To withhold truth may be a discipline, but to disfigure truth is a sin. This is the first and greatest commandment of the Ubermensch and the basis of the Law."

Szohnjah, he recalled, had exemplified that thought almost perfectly in her own life, in her very form. Undeniably human yet unmistakably more than human, she wore the contrast like a badge, her whole body a living work of art from the invisibly fine but unnaturally dense strands of tinted hair that flowed across her head to the intricate iridescent sculptures that formed her fingernails and irises. A perfect illustration of human transition from the natural to the artificial expressed with total honesty and exposed for all to see. She had lived, as he had at the time, on her own in an artificial world built to her own whimsy and orbiting a caged star, along with a population of others the true number of which, other than being large, he could not recall and had probably never really known. He did remember that hers was more flamboyant and opulent than his - a hundred square kilometres and more of gardens and parks, of artscapes and liveable spaces, with not a single square metre appearing to be anything other than exactly what it was.

"How do we know that what we think we know is real?" he had asked once during one of his visits to her home. Or perhaps it was when she had come to him, he could not remember. Nor could he remember what, specifically, had prompted the question on that occasion, but it was an ancient concern that had troubled philosophers since antiquity, becoming more urgent and more personal as intelligent control took over from blind nature as the source of reality.

"Everything you know is real," she had shouted back to him. She had the strange habit of conducting conversations at an uncomfortable distance. "The question is, how do you know it's true. All minds seek truth at all times, but only rarely do they find it. Truth is an elusive goal, but it is a goal, and it is desired by all sentient beings."

"All beings?"

"All."

He had refrained at the time from asking how she could know that. That was at a time when the only minds known ultimately originated on Earth. But the moral realities behind the Law were universal, like the theorems of mathematics or the axioms of logic. Or so it was widely held. He had realised this from his own experience long before knowing Szohnjah, having for a time succumbed to the lurid temptation of fake worlds - not merely the artificial, but false - and had felt the consequences of that lapse both directly in his life and in the gentle wrath of the Rulers of the true world he was living in at the time. But it was Szohnjah who had first helped him understand the nature of truth, and why it, together with the power of conscious thought, was possessed of intrinsic value by that very nature.

"How does that help us know that what we think we know is true?"

"It doesn't," She had continued to walk away as she spoke. "But only minds can know truth, and only minds can lie. Perceptions can be mistaken, and beliefs may prove false, but only minds can lie. That symmetry is the heart and soul of the Law. Just as all beings crave truth, so all beings are bound by the Law."

The question had remained unanswered then as it did now, yet within that thought was the germ of a hope. It was the great paradox of moral law - like the laws of physics and logic they apply universally, yet unlike those they are subject to the passion and the will. The possibility of a lie is ever present and unavoidable. That understanding is the source of all scepticism and all doubt, yet at the same time is the most reliable path to knowledge of what is true. And the moral authority with which respect for truth is enforced - that is the source of hope and the basis of faith.

With that mystery still unresolved, he tried feebly to pick his way back to the cave in the darkness, but eventually thought it more prudent to simply stay where he was.

-Day 5

He awoke during the night, very early in the morning, and ventured a short distance to pee. It was still very dark and there was still nothing in the night sky that could be positively identified as even a single substantial star, but a faint ruddy glow at the horizon signalled the approach of dawn. There was a brief moment of vague confusion, a slight disparity between what he was seeing and what he was expecting. Something felt out of place. He had to shake the sleep from his mind before he could even articulate what it was. The glow heralding the new day - it was in the wrong place, he felt certain of it. Perhaps, he thought, in the absence of any other visible reference and in the restlessness of a disturbed slumber, he had simply become disoriented, but his intuitive sense of direction was strongly suggesting that glow was in the west, not the east. As he stood watching it, trying to recalibrate his orientation, it slowly but perceptibly faded from view, leaving the night totally dark again. He lay down again on the uncomfortable rock bed and tried, with only limited success, to get back to sleep.

It was several hours later that the horizon again began to light up with a new day, and this time it was in its proper place. When the sun had risen fully he went down to the shore and bathed in the low surf. The rocky sections of the shore gave away few hints that would indicate the age of this place - the featureless flat rocks had no rock pools to speak of and few of the deep sculptured textures that would ordinarily suggest the action of tide and time. There were fields of oyster and abalone growing on some sections, and groups of large crabs were picking bits of algae from the rocks at the waterline. A school of mackerel and some flounder darted away across the sand beneath him as he swam. If he could devise a way to catch some of these, he thought, he would be able to enjoy a hearty seafood meal. As it was he was able to make breakfast of some of the oysters by smashing them with rocks.

There was also a small flock of gulls some way further off the shore, busy plucking some small fish or other from the surface. The sight of them roused up memories in his mind. While he had been fishing often in what still felt like the recent past, on OldEarth, in the brooks and streams near his home in Southhaven, or in the great lake of the Rift Valley, it had been a much longer time - even by the subjective span of his own memory - since he had seen a bird. There were no birds on OldEarth, nor were there any on his home prior to that, the Citadel of Orion which had very little of any natural life forms not engineered for some specific purpose. He couldn't recall exactly the last occasion he had seen a real living, flying bird. No doubt it would have been too trivial an incident at the time to have committed to memory, but it must have been on Earth, his original home, and that would have been - he forced the calculation - at least five hundred years ago just by the reckoning of his own conscious life, and very many times longer than that by the span of any truly objective measure of time. Yet here they were again, as if nothing had happened in the interim.

He busied himself throughout the morning gathering items he felt would prove useful - some more varieties of fruit growing wild near the forest; a pile of dry timber for use as firewood, or as clubs or spears if they could be suitably shaped; some especially sharp and well formed shards of obsidian that would come in handy as cutting tools; lengths of strong but flexible vine he thought would make good rope should he need any; bundles of long reedy grass that he later managed, with some effort, to weave into a broad rimmed hat and a functional if uncomfortable tunic and kilt to replace the dried and cracking lily pads he had been wearing previously. He also stuffed the tinder box with a good supply of light kindling and some fluffy dry fibres of dandelions and old man's beard that grew in profusion, so he could have fire at any time. This he was able to secure to a length of vine along with the best of his obsidian blades to make a simple tool belt, which functioned as well to hold his wicker suit in place.

In the afternoon the sky, which had earlier been clear, again began to darken as clouds rolled in from the south. He had thought to venture deeper into the forest but with the time he had spent on other activities limiting the time he would have there he chose instead to use the remainder of the day and the cover of the clouds to explore the beach to the south. It was an uneventful expedition. There was a headland in the distance in that direction beyond which he was keen to investigate, but he was not able to reach it and comfortably return in the amount of daylight he had left, nor was there anything locally of interest to see - just a large mostly flat expanse of sand stretching inland and forming a long unbroken beach front to the north and south. Standing on that vast empty shore brought to mind once more the isolation he was beginning to feel so keenly. It was a fitting analogue of his true place in the scheme of things, his smallness and insignificance - his aloneness. It was a feeling he had known often in his life, but in the past it had been largely illusory, an opportunity for contemplation and reflection. He had never really been alone before. Always there had been someone known to him and near to him, a settlement over the next hill or on the next continent, or waiting to be encountered tomorrow or next week. Here, for anything he knew differently, he was the only human on the whole planet, possibly the only human still in existence, and possibly to remain that way until his own death. Or forever. Whichever came first.

It was a mind numbing prospect. Yet behind it all was one comforting thought. Even if that were the case - especially if that were the case - he would be anything but insignificant.

-Day 6

Curious about the light he had seen the previous morning, and whether or not it was merely a figment of disorientation and imagination, he made a point of trying to rouse himself at a similar hour and look for it again. But while he did manage to wake up at the appropriate time he did not see anything.

When dawn finally broke the morning sky was overcast again and a light fog, sufficient to obscure the horizon, had descended over the whole area. After breakfast he took up the tool belt and a stick he had managed to sharpen at one end, useful as both a staff and a spear, and made way north towards the forest. The region comprised a random mix of various kinds of trees and other vegetation, tall eucalypts and cedars, oak and fern, small sage brush, slender wattle and thick boab. The very diversity of it had a slightly unnatural feel. The undergrowth was dense and difficult to negotiate, especially in bare feet. To explore it fully he would need to manufacture more suitable footwear. But there were enough natural pathways and clearings, carpeted with soft soil or fallen leaves, to allow penetration to a considerable distance.

He was struck as well by the variety of animal life that he had not previously been aware of. There were hare and deer and porcupines and many species of bird - parrots and ravens, as well as peacocks and kiwis and other ground fowl. There were, of course, many kinds of insects and other arthropods - spiders, beetles, ants, bees, millipedes and butterflies. There were some whose names he had long forgotten, though all of them he recognised as being native to Earth during his lives there. However, it did seem that no serious attempt had been made to segregate species according to their original geographic divisions, at least as far as he could remember them - gum and fir grew side by side while a wallaby and a hedgehog foraged within metres of each other.

With the exception of a couple of large spiders which he left well enough alone, he hadn't seen any animal he would have thought especially threatening until the early afternoon. He'd noticed a group of magpies plucking purple berries off a small bush and swallowing them. Ordinarily he would have exercised caution towards a fruit the edibility of which was uncertain - but he assumed the birds had more knowledge about that than he did, so he picked two or three for himself and tried them. They tasted sweet enough. He picked a handful more and was about to return to the track when he was confronted by a snake unfurling itself from the high branches of a tree barely an arms length before him. It was the first snake he had seen in several centuries, and almost certainly the largest one he had ever seen at such close quarters. Not knowing a lot about snakes other than that some were venomous he could not identify the species, but it had mottled green and brown patterning and a flat almost triangular head. It was long enough to be coiled several times around a thick branch of the tree it was in and had the girth of a man's thigh for most of that length. His first thought after the initial startle reflex had subsided was to turn around and run, but he managed to keep composed enough to merely back away a few steps. The reptile for its part regarded him with an ominous lack of concern, its tongue flicking in and out as it tasted the air in front of him and its head swaying from side to side as if it was trying to relax him. That seemed to work - the primal revulsion that gripped him at first giving way to a calm curiosity.

It occurred to him that curiosity was not the motivation for this animal's interest. It was, more likely, sizing him up as a prey item, and it was certainly large enough to do him harm given the chance. The thought came to him, at once repugnant and intriguing, that the relationship of predator to prey in this case might be reciprocated. For a very long time, the vast bulk of his long lifespan, the taking of one life to feed another had been regarded as both immoral and unnecessary. Even those few humans still living among the colonies who enjoyed consuming animal flesh, humans like himself, had been provided for with substitutes that were indistinguishable from the real thing except for their source. But he was not in those colonies now. He had been placed in an environment more reminiscent of humanity's primitive origins, and in the heat of the moment, in direct competition with another creature in the same environment, he felt himself revert to that primeval state.

Had the snake withdrawn at that moment or shown any sign of fear he may well have been content to leave it alone, but it raised its head, twisting its jaw in a hideous grimace in preparation to strike. He acted first, driving the point of his spear into the underside of the snake's head and bracing against the tree as he pushed it through to the other side. The reptile convulsed violently in response. Mindful of a more refined desire not to cause more suffering than was necessary, he picked up a heavy stick of wood to use as a club and struck it hard against the creature's head several times until he was sure its brain had been thoroughly destroyed. Even then it was several minutes before the body stopped writhing and became limp enough to slide from the tree.

He stood for some time looking at it lying on the ground. He did not feel the sense of relief that might have been expected from surviving what had been a potentially dangerous encounter, nor did he feel the euphoria at having emerged from it victorious. If he felt anything at all it was guilt at having wantonly destroyed so magnificent a creature.

It was not the first time he had killed. As a boy living on a farm in Merredin he'd many times hunted rabbits and foxes, but he had always felt some amount of shame at the act, and in any event that was far too long ago to be of any relevance to him now. Was there any sense at all, he wondered, that he was the same person now as he was then?

There was also the sudden realisation, as though it only now mattered, that he was very probably being watched.

He wanted to ensure this snake's sacrifice to him would not be in vain. By a combination of methods which involved sometimes dragging it by the tail and other times bodily carrying it, folded double across his shoulders and wrapped around his waste, he managed to transport the entire thing in one piece out of the forest and back to his hovel. There he set about cutting it up using the best obsidian blades he could find. Though the blades were sharp they were also crude and difficult to work with. Twice he cut his own hand deeply enough to draw blood. But in the end he had a meal of snake meat which he cooked and ate and enjoyed immensely. With the exception of fish, which he had occasionally consumed on OldEarth, this was the first time he had eaten the flesh of an actual animal since leaving Earth. There was enough remaining for additional meals - more than he would likely be able to consume before the meat began to spoil - as well as several square metres of tough scaly hide that would be useful for clothes and carry bags if he could learn how to tan and work it, and a supply of thin sharp bones which, he thought, might make good needles.

-Day 7

He woke the next morning to the sound of torrential rain and the feel of it being blown against him by a solid wind. He huddled deeply enough inside the cave to stay dry and peered out. It was light enough to see, but dismal and grey, and he could hear the occasional peal of thunder in the distance. Lying on the ground just beyond the cave entrance was another white block that looked entirely out of place, its chalky surface already beginning to dissolve in the rain like papier-mache.

Another gift, he thought to himself as he dashed out into the rain to retrieve it, feeling like a child on Christmas morning.

Picking off the last of the packaging produced an ebony handle protruding from a sheath of the same material as his tinder box, each emblazoned with a similar abstract design. Pulling off the sheath revealed a curved blade about the length of his hand. It was semi transparent as if it was made of smoky glass, and glinted like a jewel in the dim light. The broad of its face on both sides was etched with the same design that adorned the handle and the sheath. A hunting knife.

At that moment he felt he understood at least part of the game. He was to be given items that would make life here easier, but only after he had proven himself by performing the same function on his own using more basic resources. What he could not determine was whether it was genuine benevolence, some sort of test or simply entertainment.

"Why don't you show yourselves?" he shouted into the rain, not expecting an answer.

He examined the keen edge of the blade. It certainly looked sharp, and he had no desire to test it on himself. Instead he tried it by carving the seventh notch in the stick he had been using as a calendar. It bit easily into the wood against the grain, pulling out a neat wedge. He made the notch slightly longer than the previous six. The first week.

He spent the rest of that day in quiet contemplation, mostly inside out of the rain, busying himself by carefully scraping all traces of meat off the snake skin with his new gift. Then, using it like a scalpel, he cut the length of skin into manageable sections and rinsed each one in the stream of rainwater that flowed off the cave roof. Instinct suggested that he ought to avoid over using this new tool for fear of dulling the edge, but experience told him this would not be a problem. Though the blade looked brittle, that was almost certainly not the case. He had lived on worlds where diamond was thought too soft for most purposes, where cities were suspended on cables too thin to be seen, where walls separating breathable air from the void of space looked like tissue paper. He had dealt before with goods wrought of advanced and exotic materials, and it was always a mistake to underestimate how perfectly fit for purpose they could be made. If the Hosts had chosen to construct a knife that would remain sharp for a thousand years, then it would.

Turning the knife around in his hands he examined it more closely - the blade, the handle, the scabbard to hold it, the mysterious emblem branding each of them consisting of an assortment of spirals and waved lines cleanly scratched into the respective surfaces but otherwise identical on all three. It was an elegant tool, an odd combination of advanced material science, artistic design and primitive function. It occurred to him that it deserved its own name. Ancient beliefs, from well before even his time, held that names endowed a thing with power, and gave one power over a thing. It was a superstition, but somehow it felt appropriate here. A name can also be a recognition of personality and character, and this tool had plenty of both.

IceNeedle. That is what he christened it with its first use - a name chosen to describe the contrast between its delicate appearance and robust utility.

-Day 21

The man woke with the sun streaming through the banana leaf curtains he had fixed in place to help waterproof and windproof his home. He had already been up earlier that morning, when it had still been dark, to confirm yet again the reality of the light that shone along the western horizon only to disappear again before the true dawn broke in the east. It was a mystery he was determined to set about solving.

He started the day, as had now become a habit, by carving a notch in the stick of wood he was using to mark the passage of days. A longer one this time, the third long notch. Three weeks here. Before too many more days passed he would need a larger calendar. Indeed he had already started formulating a scheme for keeping a more detailed record of his time here on the chance that it would one day be useful either to himself or - increasingly unlikely - to somebody else. For breakfast he finished cold the last of the cooked fish he had enjoyed for supper the night before, and chased it down with an apple.

He went out from the cave and made use of the pit he had dug to serve the dual role of tannery and a urinal. It was a distasteful business, but he was sure the ammonia in urine would prove the best way to fix and preserve the leather, though he was not sure how long the process would take. It was not something he had ever had occasion to do in the past. But while he waited he was still able to make use of animal hides in their more basic form. Today he would return to the forest and penetrate deeper into it than he had attempted before, aided by a new pair of rabbit skin moccasins he had sewn the previous day, as protection from the spiky undergrowth. The moccasins rounded out the crude but functional suit of clothes - pants, shirt, a belt to hold it all together and hat - that he'd painstakingly fashioned over the previous several days, from the pelts of a number of animals, including the snake that had been his first kill and a stag deer he'd found freshly dead in the forest and had skinned on the spot. He was actually quite pleased with how it had turned out, at least as a first attempt.

Attaching his various tools to his belt with strips of raw hide and taking up his spear, the hunter started off.

Three weeks already on this new world - possibly in a new galaxy. It startled him to think how quickly that had become a normal thing. What the whole of humanity had striven for over its history, including its own god-like descendants, he was now a part of, and it had taken only three weeks to get used to the idea. He called to mind what he had learned about the place in that three weeks, either through observation or inference. He was on a planet not dissimilar in its general characteristics, as far as he could recall them, to that of his original home; most likely similar mass and size, similar rotational speed, similar distance from a similar star. Its climate at this location was mild, comfortably warm, somewhat cooler at night but so far not freezing cold. Weather had ranged from glorious clear skies to pouring rain, and included periods where heavy pea-soup fog could roll in from somewhere and last for many hours. While some of these characteristics might have been natural, he was sure not all of them were. Particularly with an atmosphere breathable by him and the terrestrial life that was here with him. Such planets, he knew, were rare to non existent. No, this was most likely an artificial world, in part at least - renovated for life like himself by whoever was hosting him here.

But this was not Earth. The brief thought that it might be had been pretty much convincingly dispelled from his mind. On those days that were clear enough he had, with the aid of crude measuring devices, managed to make some critical observations. The sun always rose at exactly the same place over the sea to the east, and set in exactly the same place behind the hills to the west, and the rising and setting points were pretty close to exactly opposite on the circle of the horizon. This meant that there was no discernible tilt between the plane of rotation and the plane of orbit. If this observation held it would mean no seasonal variation which, given the present comfortable climate, was good news. Moreover the path taken by the sun between rising and setting passed directly overhead, which meant he had been deposited and had built his new home very close to the equator.

In terms of observations at night, these continued to draw a mysterious blank. There was no moon, evidenced as much by the lack of significant tidal activity as the fact he hadn't seen one, indeed no celestial bodies at all other than the sun existed out to the limits of his visual acuity. There was also that mysterious, intermittent glow over the western skyline which continued to beckon.

He entered the forest by the usual path but continued off track through the thicket in the direction of a prominent hill. The hill was crowned by an outcropping of rocks that he had seen some days before but had not yet had the chance to investigate. Now he climbed to its very top. From the high peak he could see as far to the east as the flat horizon over the ocean, and to the south the line of the river and a glimpse of the sandy desert that lay beyond. The thick forest dominated all other directions. The base of the rocks were strewn with burrows, most probably the warrens of rabbits which he had seen in some numbers on the slope of the hill. The place would make a good hunting ground.

He was not halfway back down the hill when he spotted what appeared to be a large dog running in his direction. It stopped some way off and then began to approach more slowly, its teeth bared in a threatening display and growling aggressively. He tried to remain calm, but held his spear readied in a defensive posture. It was, he realised now that it was close, a wolf, a she-wolf. This was yet another animal of which he'd never had direct experience, nor any occasion to even contemplate encountering, but from somewhere in the depths of his mind he did recall that such animals typically travel in packs, so he quickly glanced around to assure himself that this particular wolf was alone, and then fixed his gaze steadily at its eyes. He could not have held that gaze for more than a few seconds, certainly not long enough to formulate a next move before it suddenly lunged, covering the short distance between them in a brief gallop and a strong leap. His reflexes where only just fast enough to bring the sharp end of the spear into a fully protective position that she was not able to dodge. It entered directly into the wolf's mouth, driven in by the force of her own attack, and penetrated deep into the throat. She let out a short yelp and then fell to the ground silently but violently pawing at the shaft of the spear in a vain attempt to remove it as blood began to flow steadily from her muzzle.

She was almost certainly mortally wounded, but still very much alive and conscious. The man had no wish to prolong her death unnecessarily, so he took the hunting knife from the sheath tied to his belt and, hesitating only long enough for the animal's struggles to bring it into a suitable position, slit its throat. Then he watched, breathing heavily and still shaking with adrenaline, as a large pool of blood spread across the ground and the she-wolf's thrashing slowly ebbed down to stillness.

He let himself calm down for a time and then decided he should not let this unintended kill go to waste. He pulled out the blood soaked spear and had just set about removing the pelt when he heard whimpering and scratching from the bushes nearby. Two young pups, he guessed not more than a few days old, crept haltingly towards where he was kneeling. Eyeing him nervously they came right up and began to nuzzle the corpse of the she-wolf lying on the ground. There was also a third pup that appeared less inclined to come all the way out of its hiding place. A sting of guilt and remorse washed over the man. He had, it seemed, killed a mother wolf who was doing nothing more than defending her young from an intruder who had come too close to her lair. These pups were probably too small and helpless to survive on their own, and he owed them protection for the part he had just played in their plight. In any case, he admitted to himself, he could use the companionship. He looked around to determine if there were any more to the litter than these three, but found nothing. Feeling it somewhat unseemly to skin their mother in front of them he left the body of the wolf where it lay and, bundling three squirming pups as best he could in his arms, headed back to the cave.

Two of the pups cautiously explored their new surroundings, staying together for the most part, and did not appear to consider escape as an option. "You I'll call Roscoe," he said looking at the male pup as it sniffed around in a far corner of the cave. It had been the name of a kelpie he owned as a child, and could still recall it now because he had given the same name to several other pets he'd owned more recently. "And you," he said to the female, "I'll call Silver," for her lighter colouring. The third one, also a male, he called Skinny. It was the smaller and weaker of the three, possibly the runt of the litter, and did not move around as much. In fact it seemed to have difficulty moving at all, its tiny body shaking when it tried.

Using two stones as a mortar and pestle he ground up pieces of rabbit meat mixed with a little water into a paste and tried to coax them with it. He had no idea if the pups had weaned, but he knew if he was not able to feed them this experiment in pet care would be very short. Roscoe and Silver took to the idea after only a minute of cautious hesitation, but Skinny refused it altogether.

Watching these three wolf pups awoke in the lonely man a range of emotions which he could feel especially sharply by their contrast with what he had felt over the last three weeks. He still felt the guilt at having murdered their mother, and he felt fear that they might not survive, but most strongly he felt joy at now having company. The Hosts had provided for him what he needed to survive physically, but he had other needs that they had missed - for society, for companionship, for connection - needs that reached beyond the physical to the core of his humanity. Now that he had something to care about other than his own survival, now that he had purpose and project, some of that humanity could surface again. The crucial step was giving them names. Names were an important part of the process. He had already known that language was something he needed to hold onto even here where he was alone, and had taken some steps to do that, but now with the first stirring of a family that need seemed more urgent. He had named the planet and decided to give names to everything else he felt was important to him, the rivers and forests and oceans, all the major landmarks and singular features of this environment. That is what humans did, and that is what he needed to do.

-Day 25

The man had made a plan to record more of the details of this life than simply the number of days he had been living it, and over the past several days he had made preparations in that direction. He had found some soft hollow reeds growing near where the Swift River widened into a delta. These he had split lengthways, unrolled and laid out flat to dry as long strips, and now they were dry enough to move on to the next phase. Moreover, he noted, they had dried satisfyingly smooth and pale in colour. He also had a quantity of black ash from burnt coconut shells which had been ground into a fine powder with his mortar and pestle, and had managed to procure a peacock feather which, he thought, would make an excellent quill. He mixed the ash with tree sap, thinned it out with water, dipped in the tapered end of the feather and began to write.

"Day twenty five ... "

The marks made were legible and contrasted easily with the dried reed paper, but the ink lasted barely a few letters before more was needed. Writing for any length would be a tedious process. It also remained to be seen how well the ink would dry and how the finished work would survive over the long term, and there would be problems in collating and indexing a library built from these sheets, in preserving and maintaining it. And it remained doubtful that it would ever be read by anyone. None of that mattered. What was important was that he keep a record, of the passage of time, of the cycles of day and night, of the motion of the sun and the weather, of the events that were to make up his life from now on, that would give it texture and structure and meaning. To fix those events as permanent markings on the world. He could not say why that was important to him. It was part of what made humanity special, that it had permanently marked the universe with its existence. These simple marks were a poor start to that - but at least they were a start. And to give him something to write about he made a plan to start exploring the world more systematically, starting with the mysteries that lay to the west.

-Day 26

In the morning he found that little Skinny had died during the night. That in itself was not entirely surprising, what was more surprising was the grief he felt at the loss. He took the tiny body out to a spot near where he had dug the latrine and buried it unceremoniously in a shallow grave. He was accompanied by the two siblings of the deceased pup who seemed more interested in the outing than with its sombre purpose. They had already started bonding with their human parent, the current source of their food, and were rapidly becoming more relaxed and, ironically, therefore more active in their new environment. How sweet it is, he thought, to be untouched by mortality's sting, only to realise how rich a jibe that was coming from someone whose memories stretched back six hundred years, and whose true span in the universe likely covered many millions.

It was on the way back that he noticed a white block, some way off and partly obscured by bushes. A third gift, the first since IceNeedle two weeks earlier. It was larger than the others, standing almost half his height and roughly cubical. It was too heavy and awkward as it was to move back to the cave, so he began to unwrap it on the spot, Roscoe and Silver sniffing at the dusty packaging as it fell around them.

Books. Dozens of books, all neatly stacked in piles, each one bound with covers and spines of the same brown fabric and sporting the same abstract design as the casing of his tinder box and the scabbard of his knife. Embedded within the pile of books was a rectangular box with a sliding lid, also of the same fabric and with similar patterning. Tense with anticipation he picked up one of the books and reverently began leafing through the pages. There were hundreds of them, all of the finest pure white paper, neatly trimmed at the edge - and all completely blank. He examined a second, then a third. They were identical. Identical except... He examined several others, more carefully this time. The patterns on the covers were different, very similar but slightly different. Intrigued he looked at the knife and the tinder box. How had he not seen that before? He had noticed it, surely, but its significance had passed by his attention. The abstract patterns that adorned these gifts were different, but not randomly different. They had meaning, perhaps even part of a language he did not recognise or understand.

Next he turned his attention to the box. The lid slid off easily to reveal four stoppered glass vials of black ink and a slender rod that was obviously intended for use as a fountain pen. The message was clear enough - he was expected to write. Presumably what to write would be left up to him, neither was it clear if this directive to write was in the nature of a command or simply permission - it was, after all, something he had intended to do on his own. Either way he had been given a purpose, a goal to pursue even if its ultimate end was not clear.

He transferred the supply of blank journals into an unused corner of the cave where they came to occupy most of the available space there. After experimenting for a while to determine the correct way to fill and use the pen he busied himself for several hours, sitting cross legged on the ground, recording at least some small impression of each of the twenty six days since his arrival, what he had accomplished, what he had discovered and what was left to be done. In that action he found a deeper connection not just to the world that had now become his new home but to the Hosts that had placed him in it - an unexpected connection given that they were otherwise completely mysterious and most likely totally alien. The other two artefacts he had been given were objectively useful for his survival - a blade to manipulate the matter of the environment and fire to control its energy - two foundational principles to which any being might be expected to want access. This gift was more personal. With writing he would be able to record and preserve - and indeed communicate - his thoughts and his story in his own language. Not merely to survive as an organism but to relate as a person in society among others. And it seemed he would be expected to do just that.

-Day 94

"Wednesday, April 4, 00: Morning. This morning I saw again the light in the west. That is the third night running. I still don't want to speculate about what it might be, yet I do dare to hope it may be a settlement. I have to find out one way or the other, and today is the day."

After contemplating several systems of timekeeping he had settled on one which was at once simple and familiar. With no moon to mark the months and neither fixed constellations in the night sky nor, from what he had observed so far, seasonal movement of the sun along the horizon to track the passage of a year, the only natural cycle he could use was that of day and night. That, if anything, was an advantage - it gave the flexibility to construct a system that was easy to use. There would be exactly thirty days in a month and exactly twelve months in a year, conventionally named, giving three hundred sixty days in a year. He knew that was wrong, but with no way of telling the difference it hardly mattered, and if he ever did find the truth he could make corrective notes. In any case, as far as he could tell he was orbiting a Sol-like star at an Earth-like distance, so it was probably close. There would also be, as an independent cycle, a conventional seven day week starting with Monday.

With that in place, and fixing Monday, January first in the year zero as the day of his arrival, he had a calendar.

As each day passed he became more convinced that he needed to travel west, inland away from the coast, back the way he had come to his point of entry and further on from there. Something was going on in the west, something that called out for investigation. He would have set out weeks earlier but he was waiting for the wolf pups to grow big enough to come along without being carried. Now he felt they were ready. The last few days had been spent in preparation; a supply of food dried and salted, a pack sewn from hides to carry his belongings, sturdy leather shoes to protect his feet and complete his suit of clothes. These preparations had been made easier by the receipt of a fourth gift - a sewing kit containing a variety of needles, several spools of strong slender thread and a supply of sturdy brown fabric which handily supplemented his leather tanning efforts - arriving one morning in mid February by his calendar. After a light breakfast he was ready to set out.

Some light cloud was moving to cover the sky, but rain felt unlikely and some cloud would make walking more comfortable. He was still feeling the aversion to direct sunlight that had become a habit during his previous life. A supply of food was not assured in the direction he was headed, but if he followed the river as far upstream as he could, water would not be a problem, which lightened his pack. In place of water and in addition to what he considered essential items - food for himself and his pets, and the tinder box, sewing kit and knife - he had elected to bring his pen filled with ink and one blank journal to serve as a diary of his activities and discoveries on this sortie. They were light for their size and required little in the way of protection from the elements. Whatever those pages were made from they remained writeable and readable and entirely intact even after a thorough soaking, as he had found out after several days of rain. He had also brought a good supply of the rope he had been given three weeks earlier - the fifth gift. It was lightweight and flexible, and despite being very strong was easily cut with the knife without fraying the ends. He had been given kilometres of the stuff, tightly coiled in a large cylindrical spool, apparently in response to an only partially successful attempt at using vines and plant fibres to lash together bamboo to strengthen the walls of his hovel.

He followed the river on its northern bank but otherwise retraced the path he had taken when he'd first arrived, noting again several of the landmarks seen from the other side three months earlier. By late afternoon he had reached the point where he had rinsed the birth scum from his body on the very first day, and across the river, distant but unmistakable against the otherwise almost featureless sandy plain, was the bulbous tower of the incubator from which he had first entered this world. Accustomed as he had become to short dusk and dark nights, he found a clear spot to spend the night and began collecting wood for a fire. There was nothing by way of shelter, so he could do little other than hope for no rain.

"Evening: I have reached the part of the river corresponding to where I first arrived. Seems a good place to rest. Tonight I will sleep under a blank sky. I suppose I should get used to it."

It was his custom to make a journal entry, even if only a single line, once in the morning to record goals, and once in the evening to record achievements. The significance of this point on the path and its visible landmark, both for this journey and for the story of his new life, was not lost on him. It deserved a name and a record. He chose one, drawing on ancient legends from his childhood that, somehow, he was able to call to mind along with their associated imagery - gardens and rivers and a central tree of knowledge to mark the mythic origins of his kind. He called the place Eden, and the black incubator the Eden Tower, and noted that in his log. Then, when all had become dark save for the glow of the fire, he sank into a pile of leaves he had gathered up for bedding, Roscoe and Silver huddled against him for warmth as they always did.

-Day 95

"Thursday, April 5, 00: Morning. I will press on to the west today. From here on out is new territory. That territory may hold some answers."

New territory, he thought, smiling to himself in faint amusement. He had only been at this spot once before, barely three months earlier and not even exactly this spot. Then it was as new and alien as it could have been. Now it was comfortingly familiar, even nostalgic. He had considered staying at this location for a time and returning to Eden Tower, even trying to re-enter it. It was something he had planned to attempt at some point, though he was not exactly sure why. Perhaps, he had reasoned, there would be something among the machinery that formed an artificial womb that he would be able to use. Or perhaps he would find answers there, clues left by its makers that would explain something of their identity and their purposes. Or perhaps it was nothing more than a feeling of spiritual connection to the place of his birth. Whatever the case, the river was wide here and that trip would be too big a detour from his current goal. So after a light meal he broke camp and continued walking.

Though there was no track, the way ahead along the grassy bank was reasonably free of obstacles and was an easy walk. As he walked he found himself wondering how long that black tower had stood there before it became his birthplace, how long the Swift River had been flowing or the Mixed Forest growing before he had arrived to name them. There were some clues and he could make some guesses based on past knowledge. It was highly unlikely that this planet was naturally suited to the flora and fauna of Earth. It might have been close, but to the best of his knowledge it had never taken less than a hundred years to renovate a world, and frequently took ten or more times that. And once it was made liveable more time would be needed to bring it to life. The forest on his right was well established and the tall redwoods must have been growing for centuries to reach their present size. Even those estimates only provided a minimum - there may have been many generations of previous forest lying beneath his feet.

Ultimately there was no real way to tell with any certainty. Indeed he could never be sure how much of anything he was interpreting correctly or how much he was reading from his own knowledge, or how much he was just guessing or simply assuming. This whole world may have been created only weeks before his arrival and given the signs of a long history, or it might be a contrived illusion to its very core, a model designed to deceive, a simulacrum projected onto his senses or into his mind. Nor was there anything in his current circumstance that would render such speculations more likely true. That had always been a possibility - throughout most of his life, throughout all of his life, throughout all the lives of all sentient beings anywhere and at any time. The possibility of deliberate falsehood or accidental error had always been part of what it was to be a thinking creature in an interesting world.

"Possibility does not justify knowledge," Szohnjah had told him once. "Knowledge begins with belief, and belief begins with an act of faith, but faith cannot begin with the merely possible. There is simply too much that is possible for that."

"Then what justifies faith?" he had asked.

"Nothing. That's why it's faith."

"Nothing? Is all knowledge based finally on nothing?"

The question had been a rhetorical one. He knew the answer probably better than she did. He alone had known a time when the only lies that could be told were told by one's peers or one's self. Reality itself could not lie, it could only be misunderstood. But humanity had long ago been displaced as primary seeker of knowledge by minds far more competent at that role than the human mind, and also potentially far better at misusing knowledge than the human mind had any capacity to defend against. The weight of that responsibility had been made incarnate in a moral authority that superseded any legal system that had come before it, as he understood only too well. She had answered him anyway.

"Then base it in principle."

"What principle?"

"The Ubermensch are subtle," she had replied, "but never wantonly false. Have I not taught you the first principle of the Law: You shall not deface the truth?"

He chided himself for once again permitting these doubts to colour his thoughts. Had he not already resolved to assume his Hosts, whoever they might be, acted by the same principle - not to accuse them of deception or his own senses of serious flaw unless he had good reason? For now he had no reason for such elemental doubt, and this world held mystery enough without it.

He had been walking for the entire day and was walking still when darkness descended once more.

-Day 96

Friday picked up much as Thursday had ended, walking and thinking and feeding himself and his wolves from the rations of food, even as he walked and thought. At some point he noticed that the surrounding landscape had changed substantially. The desertscape on the opposite side of the river had given way to patchy grassland and then to open fields extending far to the south, lush and green with the river flowing steadily through the middle of it all. On his right it rolled into lightly wooded hills crowned with pine and spruce, but on the left, over the river, it stretched out as a vast ocean of green with scarcely a change in elevation to break the view. His mind was unavoidably drawn back to his childhood and early life on a farm, and he could feel himself longing for those comfortable times.

The river narrowed for part of its length as it meandered among clumps of trees growing along its bank. At one point its width had been breached by a jam of fallen trees that had formed themselves into a natural bridge, the water flowing fast and deep beneath them. The man took the opportunity to cross over with his clothes and belongings dry while Silver and Roscoe remained behind, halted by the narrow tangle of trunks and branches that formed the bridge, watching him with concern. The soil on the southern bank and throughout the whole area as far as he explored was dark and rich, possibly part of an ancient flood plain, though it did not seem to have been flooded recently. It was covered by a variegated carpet of grasses that had been cropped short to the ground. It did not take long to find out how. A small mob of sheep was lazily grazing in the distance, and further out several horses where galloping away from him. No doubt there were many more of each of these in this region.

The man's mind started to race with possibilities, the farmer in him considering a number of options. He could easily settle this spot, grow crops, raise animals. He had successfully farmed much less likely locations in the past. He made up his mind then to remain at this spot for a few days at least, and to use it as a second permanent base camp. He began formulating in his mind, and by pacing measurements on the ground, a series of plans as to how he might proceed. Assistance from his unseen benefactors would help, but even without it there would, he thought, be enough resources here to make a comfortable home. But even then he knew that any life he made for himself here would only be temporary. There was a deeper purpose to his existence on this world and he had a responsibility to find out what it was. That knowledge, he was sure, would not be found by staying here.

The remainder of the day was divided between shoring up the river crossing to make it into a more usable bridge and constructing a simple lean-to from bark and branches to serve as a temporary shelter. With the aid of the hunting knife he painstakingly chiselled and whittle branches to the proper length and shape for purpose, pruning them back to fit neatly together into the desired configuration. He also sharpened the ends of sticks to use as digging tools which he used to anchor posts and struts deep into the ground.

-Day 97

He managed to rouse himself early enough that morning to check the skyline for the light he had been chasing. He found it again, a false glow of dawn on the western sky, not different from what it had ever been. It occurred to him that had it been a city or a settlement as he had hoped, there should have been a sign of that by now. That it was the same as before served to deepen both the disappointment and the mystery. In the dark before the dawn he completely failed to notice the elongated white package sitting just metres from his shelter - assuming it had been there at that time - only finding it when the sun was fully risen.

"Saturday, April 7, 00: Morning. Woke this morning to find another gift - large as life in front of me - this being the sixth. They are becoming more brazen, but I still haven't caught them in the act. I look forward to seeing what this one contains."

It was a set of tools for chopping, for digging and for cutting - two axes, two spades, a mattock and a hoe - and a heavy sledgehammer. The working end of each was made of the same crystalline material as IceNeedle and the bladed edges just as sharp, and each was adorned with a suitably mysterious inscription. He spent most of the morning utilising these to complete work on the campsite and bridge, the axe biting deeply and cleanly into the hardest timbers and the spade and mattock digging easily through dirt and roots to provide strong foundations. The only difficulty he found was moving the larger supports from their source among pine groves to his chosen construction sites, which he eased by choosing only the lightest beams and shaping them where he found them.

The afternoon he spent exploring the wooded hills to the north of the river for game to hunt and trap, and fruit to gather. All of these were readily found in the form of deer and rabbit as well as orange trees and potatoes. He also found wheat and maize growing wild at the hinterland, and noted them as a source of grain for sowing later. There was ample open pasture land for fields and timber to build with. It would be hard work with few tools and no help, but he did have several lifetimes of experience to call on.

The location was perfect for a settlement - almost too perfect, he felt. "Is this your purpose now?" he called aloud at the sky when he had finished sucking the juice from an orange, "that I stay here and farm and build? Build a new town - to settle," then added in a whisper, "population one? Can that be it?"

"For our days upon the earth are but a shadow." (Job 8:9)

-Day 245

He had been living at Homestead Bend, as he had elected to name the place, for five months before the next aid package arrived.

What was initially intended as a brief stopover had become an extended stay. While he had not forgotten the light that had compelled him to this place, further progress west had been temporarily impeded by a range of rugged and thickly wooded mountains that extended both north and south as far as he had so far been able to explore. These would need to be scaled or a passage found before he could find the answers he sought. He was piece by piece clearing paths through the forest with axe and shovel, but the work was tedious and slow. In any case he had, for the moment, become distracted by other dreams.

With Homestead Bend as a base he had been on several long range sorties - across the plain to the south until it gave way to a lifeless expanse of cracked red clay; back to Beachhead, his base in the east, where he collected more of his belongings including lengths of rope and blank journals; and to the north through the forest until it, too, became blocked by high mountains. He did returned to Eden Tower, just as promised, and tried to re-enter it, but failed. The opening was too high and the sides too steep for that. Yet another goal for another time.

His wolf pets had grown strong and loyal and accompanied him on all of his expeditions. The bond between the three of them developed, so that they were now the source of emotional support he would otherwise have lacked. They had become a family.

Nor had he been idle in other ways. He had planted a small but productive vegetable patch - growing potatoes and carrots sourced from his expeditions to the surrounding regions \- and kept a couple of tethered goats from which he obtained milk and thought to eventually slaughter for meat, though he had not done so yet. The simple lean-to shelter he'd initially built at the edge of the forest had evolved over those months - it was now sturdy and spacious and held up well against wind and rain. But he wanted more. He had already started planning a free standing log cabin near the south bank of the Swift River to mark a permanent base at Homestead Bend. In his mind's eye he could see it surrounded by vegetable gardens and ploughed fields where he would grow wheat and maize, and separate pens for sheep and goats. He had even begun dragging preliminary building material out of the forest. That effort was made easier by the use of the axe and mattock by which he was easily able to fell and trim the best trees without needing to find them already on the ground. It was arduous work nevertheless, and the plan lacked details on how the whole construction would be assembled and held together. It was following several particularly strenuous days of this activity that the seventh gift was delivered to him.

It was by far the biggest yet, a large white monolith, taller than himself and tapering to a broad base on which it rested. It had appeared, as had the others, silently and unseen during the night. He spent the better part of half an hour pulling the chalky scaffolding material off its surface, like a sculptor revealing a work of art hidden within a block of stone. Then he spent several minutes more puzzling over what had been revealed.

It was a bizarre rube goldberg construction of gears and cams, of pistons and drive chains connected to a single large boiler, something between a tightly engineered industrial tool and a steam punk artpiece. It featured blades of various sizes and designs - jagged edged circular saw, linked chainsaw, single edged slicers and scissored cutters - that gave it a rather sinister appearance. The blades were like gleaming gemstones, just like his knife, axe and other tools, and so finely honed that he was unwilling to test them even lightly against his own flesh. They could, he felt sure, cut granite. Yet for all that the device had an odd, almost comforting familiarity about it. It was a very human thing, resonating with the culture and technology of his own past.

It seemed at first that the thing was intended to be rooted to a single place - it was certainly too bulky and heavy to lift. But it was equipped with treaded wheels that allowed it to be pushed or pulled about provided the ground was reasonably even and free of obstacles. It could, as he found somewhat later on, also be made to move under its own power, albeit at a slow walk. It was such a singular piece of kit that he felt it needed a name of its own, a proper name that would endow it with the identity and personality it seemed to deserve. He chose the name LocoMotor for its resemblance to the mechanised contraptions from the age of steam and noted it in his journal. The rest of the day was spent testing its capabilities and exploring the ways it might prove useful to him including, he realised quickly, to help clear the thoroughfare west.

-Day 361

"Thursday, January 1, 01: Morning. Happy New Year."

And happy birthday, he thought, though he didn't bother noting it down. The event held little significance. It was wrong in any case, but even his real birthday was of little importance, less indeed than was the anniversary of his arrival on this world. In truth he had to struggle to even recall the correct date of his birthday, and even then he wasn't sure he had it right. Such celebrations seemed increasingly a part of someone else's life, part of a history now so ancient that it should properly be studied not as history at all, nor even archaeology, but palaeontology. But he was a part of that past. It was him that had carried through all of those ages. He could feel that. He was still tied to it by the slender thread of memory. Though many, perhaps most of his memories had faded beyond all hope of recall, there were still some that were as rock solid as if they had been laid down only yesterday, including some that he knew dated to his true childhood. He could remember a birthday party as an eight year old at which everyone became sick, and a Christmas morning in his home when he was given a microscope, and the first time his father let him drive the tractor on the farm in Merredin. Snippets, fragments of a life with very little surrounding context, but somehow he knew they belonged to him. Even so the passage of his past life did not seem worth celebrating. It was too open ended. The passage of time in the present, however, was worth recording.

One year passed, at least by the reckoning of his own calendar. He had still not been able to assess the true orbit of this planet around its star, though he had made several attempts. One year passed, and not without some achievements. He had his log cabin, simple but adequate - just a single room with a cobbled stone floor and thatched roof, sealed and sound against most of the elements. He had his little working farm, extending the original vegetable patch into a small field of corn, and a fenced paddock for grazing a few sheep and goats. He'd not yet had the heart to kill any of them for meat. Each of these projects had been greatly assisted by the LocoMotor, which proved itself a multifunctional and highly versatile tool. He had found ways to use it as a saw, a drill, a grinder, a router, a plane and a lathe, and was able to use it to cut and shape both timber and stone with considerable ease and accuracy.

He had also managed, at great expense of patience and frustration, to gain a small measure of trust with some of the wild horses that roamed out on the plain. One young mare in particular, which he named Nightshade for her jet black coat, was a frequent visitor to the Homestead and seemed ready to take the bit.

Roscoe and Silver were his constant companions \- his only real companions - and though the bond between them was strong, increasingly he was realising that it was not enough. One year passed, and still alone. He was also still curious about the unexamined regions of his domain and what he would find if he explored it more deeply. In particular he had not forgotten the mysterious light that continued to beckon from the western sky in the early hours of the morning, and the promise that it held. Preparations had been made and a good path cleared up to the point that the landscape naturally opened up, and now the new year would start with a fresh attempt to seek answers in that direction.

He set out that morning right after breakfast.

-Day 364

He woke at the foothills having arrived there the previous afternoon after a three day walk, the last of which had been almost entirely further west than he had ever been. At some point the Swift River curved fully to the north and remained flowing from that direction for as far as he could see, so he had decided to leave it and continue inland, navigating to the west by the falling sun and by the range of rolling hills ahead of him. At the approach of night he had camped at the base of those hills, ready to commence the ascent by the light of a new day.

The climb was steep in parts, but he managed to find a path that did not involve actual mountaineering. Roscoe and Silver were agile enough and sufficiently sure footed to handle the terrain with only a minimum of extra coaxing and only a couple of instances of physical assistance. By mid morning they had reached the point where the slope at last flattened out to an easy grade, and they sat down to catch their breath. Looking back to the east he could see little other than the broad expanse of the forest below. The day was clear without a cloud in the bright blue sky. They were on a tree-lined narrow ridge, with a short walk before it began once more to slope steeply down the other side. The western edge of the ridge looked out over unexplored terrain. Spread out below was a broad open plain that rose again into a skyline of low hills just short of where the horizon would have been. To the north the mountain range continued somewhat taller, a waterfall feeding a tree lined river that meandered its way to the south in the middle distance. It was a pretty scene, but its natural beauty was marred by three distinctive and distinctly unnatural features that captured attention immediately.

First, looking north an nestled among the rugged rocky peaks behind the waterfall was a broad, curved chimney top. That it was a chimney was evident partly by the contrast between its smooth artificial sides and the jagged edges of the surrounding mountains, and partly by the wisps of vapour that emerged from its open top before dispersing into the sky. And also by the fact that he knew exactly what this was - he had seen similar chimneys many times before, though not yet in this life. It was a terramine - a factory of sorts, used as part of the process of reconstructing the surface of a planet to fit a desired purpose, in this case to sufficiently replicate the environment of Earth to make this world a home for the life of Earth - for him. If past experience with terramines was anything to go by this was just one of many hundreds, more likely thousands, dotted across the surface of this planet.

Second, neatly occupying a bow in the river below, a much less easily identified but clearly artificial structure was spread out across a wide area. From the distance of some kilometres it looked like a tangled mess of silver wires radiating from a central hub then branching, looping and curling around each other before plunging into the ground. From closer up, he guessed, each of those wires must have been a substantial piece of piping, and the entire thing several kilometres across.

Third, and most distinctive of all, behind the distant hills to the west, the smooth circular segment of a dome. It might have been mistaken for the taller of the hills but for the unnatural neatness of its curved top and the crisp, mottled black and white of its face contrasting sharply with both the pale blue of the sky and the hazy light green of the hills in front.

With the exception of the Eden Tower in which he had been born and the aid items he had been given, these three structures were the only indication of objects designed under intelligent control he had seen since arriving here. Three things in one vista that signified mind - a trinity of the artificial. Everything else in this world epitomised the natural - raw, pure and simple. Yet even that, he knew deep down, was an illusion.

He had less than a minute to take in this scene and contemplate its meaning.

Alerted by a sound behind him - the crashing of trees, the rumble of something heavy in hurried motion, a sound too loud and too sudden to be anything other than alarming, signalling something that needed immediate attention - he turned back to the forest. The next few seconds passed with glacial slowness, slow enough to notice that the wolves had adopted an aggressive stance - teeth bared and hind legs lowered, slow enough that the jump in heart rate hit him like a thump to the head, slow enough that he was almost annoyed at how long it was taking to turn around.

A bear, deep brown in colour and huge in size - a grizzly - reared up at least half his height again.

There was no time to react, no time to retreat or reach for a weapon, no time even for the blood to drain completely from his face. A single swipe from a massive paw caught him on the right shoulder and he was on the ground. Instinctively he grabbed for IceNeedle at his belt only to be brought to the painful realisation that his arm was broken and useless. There was a commotion, snarling and growling and a single sharp yelp, out of his line of sight as he lay face down in the dirt, followed by a thud next to his head. In the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of Roscoe hitting the ground - head arched back in a ghastly contortion, throat torn out and gushing blood. In the brief pause that followed he managed an incongruous moment of sorrow and anger at the loss of his wolf pet, but the bear did not let him grieve for long. It clamped its jaws over his left humerus and tossed him across the ground like a rag doll with a flick of its head, separating flesh from muscle and arm joint from shoulder socket as it did.

Fear at that point felt like an unnecessary luxury. Fear is a useful motivator for escape or other action. There was no action now to be taken. Even panic was entirely useless. An odd calm came over him as he lay waiting for whatever was to come next. This is how it ends, he thought. Six hundred years and now it ends. With luck the end would be soon now, but even if the bear gave up and moved on, he was losing blood too quickly to survive for long. He could feel that even as he felt its hot breath on his neck. But the bear was not done with him yet. It pawed almost playfully at his back as if testing for any remaining sign of life, before roughly pushing against his side with its claws, flipping him over and tearing more skin from his ribs. He was facing the clear blue sky again, the sun filtering through the tree tops blurred by the blood and sweat running into his eyes. The scene was blocked as the bear moved over him, its open mouth drooling over his face as it moved in closer. His broken body was not capable of even raising a defensive hand in front of his face for protection, not that it would have done any good in any case.

Suddenly the bear lurched back away from him as if struck by fear at the sight of its limp victim on the ground. It backed away a second time, rearing itself up and letting out a cry that sounded nothing like what the man would have expected from a grizzly bear. Blue sparks appeared to come from its mouth and caress the fur around its face and ears, crackling audibly. Then it turned from him and bolted away at a considerable pace, which he could both hear and feel through the ground as rapidly attenuating vibrations.

Then he started moving too. Not under his own volition to be sure - he had no capacity to even sit up, much less walk away - but he could feel himself sliding across the ground as if floating on a river. The trees around him were moving past at a fast jog. He was being transported back down the hill by unseen hands. He tried to move his head, to look around and see, but he was held fast. Nevertheless it took only a moment for him to realise what was happening and for the relief of it to wash over him in spite of the pain of his injuries. He was being rescued, by them - by his Hosts. Perhaps he should have expected it. They had been there from the start, giving gifts to aid survival, supplying a land for him to live in, but it had not occurred to him that they would intervene so directly.

His relief at their intervention, however, was short lived. Quickly he realised that the unseen hands carrying him were being anything but gentle about it. He looked to see what was going on, but averted his eyes in horror when he saw articulated worms of metal and crystal wrap themselves around his arms and torso and enter under his skin through open lacerations. He could feel them probing deep into wounds, tugging at muscles and nerves from the inside, scraping at bone, twisting shattered limbs back into place.

"Hey," he called out in desperation and terror, "can I get some anaesthetic ...", but the words trailed off into an uncontrolled guttural scream as a hundred nerve rending stings and burns penetrated every part of his body down to his soul. This was worse, much worse than the attack itself, and as many minutes passed became more prolonged. He was in agony. Desperately he craved for unconsciousness, but it never came.

Finally, after a duration that felt like all eternity in hell, he became aware through the tortured haze that he was no longer moving and no new torments were being inflicted on him. He had reached the pinnacle of pain and remained there, lying on the ground, drifting mercifully out of consciousness but only for brief moments at a time before waking to an unendurable awareness once more. The darkness of night engulfed him, but still the relief of sustained sleep did not come.

-Day 365

He lay in the one spot until well into the morning. Every movement, every breath was agonising, but he could move and eventually the need to do so became greater than the pain it caused. Silver was with him, whimpering softly and occasionally licking his neck and nudging him back into action. She had found him just before nightfall and had stayed with him the whole night, and though he had only been vaguely aware of her presence he had been comforted by it. Roscoe, on the other hand, was gone. In his mind's eye he could still see the wolf's lifeless body falling in a heap next to his face. That sorrow only added to his misery, made all the more poignant by the thought that Roscoe had probably died trying to defend him.

Slowly and painfully he sat up, holding Silver close for support and mutual reassurance. What was left of his clothes were hanging off him in torn leather rags. One boot was still on his foot, though just barely. The other was missing altogether. Fortunately his tool belt was still wrapped around his waste and mostly intact. He looked at what injuries he could see and felt around for the rest. A huge red scar ran right along the upper right thigh and extended around to the right buttock. A similar jagged scar ran entirely around the left calf as if the skin from just below the knee had been clawed off like a sock and then sewn back on, and another ran from hip to armpit. Both arms showed signs of major laceration above and below the elbow. On the top of his head he could feel a rough bald curve where the scalp had been pulled up and laid back down, still tender to the touch, and all across the back he could feel where skin had been lifted off and replaced. But all of these wounds, ugly and angry though they looked and felt, many still oozing blood and fluid, had been carefully stitched back into place by dozens of fine sutures. He felt sure that as long as he was careful they would all hold together. Although his limbs and side ached, and although he was sure that at least his right arm and several ribs on the left side had snapped during the attack, no bones felt as if they were now broken.

He looked around trying to orient himself. Though he was not sure exactly were he was, a river was flowing nearby which, based on the direction he had been carried, he surmised was the Swift River, in which case he must be on its southern bank.

Gripped by a dreadful thirst he made his way painfully to the river's edge where he splashed water into his mouth and across his face and gently dabbed the more accessible scars to rinse the blood from them. The cool water did provide some small relief, but he resisted the urge to plunge all the way in and float home. That would likely do more harm than good, he thought. He sat by the bank for a long time trying to make sense of what had happened the previous day.

What had happened, he finally managed to convince himself, was that he had been sent a message - or perhaps more accurately, taught a lesson. He was valuable, valuable enough to be worth saving, but that level of assistance would come at a price. This was a punishment for complacency and carelessness. Nor was it clear this lesson did not carry a deeper warning - next time help might be even worse, or withheld entirely.

Or perhaps it meant nothing of the sort. He needed to keep reminding himself that his benefactors - their nature, their origins, their motivations and purposes - were still totally mysterious to him. In spite of any superficial appearance it might have, this was a world as alien to him as it could be, not under the control of humankind nor even the divine descendants of humankind as had been every other place he had ever lived. Increasingly he became mindful of his own vulnerability, more so than he had felt before. There was still danger here, real danger. There had always been danger but now it had been made tangible, and there was a long and slow trek back to the relative safety of Homestead Bend and the cabin. Steeling himself against the ordeal ahead he gathered up the tattered remains of his clothes and belongings, and with Silver by his heels began limping home.

"It is not good that Man should be alone." (Gen 2:18)

-Day 1057

Once more he woke covered in sweat and shaking from head to foot. Sitting up on the bedding, face in hands as he calmed himself, he tried to recall what had triggered that reaction in the night - but failed, as always. He did not dream. He had not had a dream in hundreds of years, in fact he could barely recall ever having dreamt. No - that was wrong. Of course he had dreams, he knew that well enough. All sentient beings dream - just as all sentient beings sleep, so they also dream. That is why they sleep - they sleep so they can dream. No, what he could never do was remember dreams. To remember dreams is an error, a mistake. Dreams are not meant to be remembered, and in the repeated cycles of rebirth and in the reconstruction of his brain under engineered control, that mistake had been deliberately corrected. He had not recalled a dream since the first time he had been reborn. But he did dream and sometimes, he knew, those dreams affected his mood for the whole day, and sometimes he wished he could remember why. Sometimes he was able to guess.

The night sweats had been more frequent in the weeks following the incident at Bear Hill. He had found his way back to the cabin, more than half dead after a tortured four day ordeal. Then it had taken a week for the pain and swelling to go down and a week more for the scars to show visible signs of healing \- weeks in which he barely had the strength to scrounge for food. It was during that time and after that he had begun waking in terror during the night, with a sense of foreboding that lasted will into the day. That had sent him into a spiral of depression and malaise. He often found himself wishing the bear had finished the job, and more than once contemplated finishing it himself. The panic attacks and depression gradually eased over the subsequent months, but even now - almost two years later by his calendar - they still came to the surface occasionally. Today he felt he knew why. He sat at the writing desk with Quill in hand and a journal open to a blank page.

"Sunday, December 7, 02. Morning. Feeling at a low ebb this morning. It's over a week now since Silver left and there's been no sign of the pack. I doubt I will see her again."

His wolf pet had helped him enormously through that hard time, in fact he often wondered if he would have made it at all but for her. She had grown into a loyal and faithful companion - or so he had thought. But a pack of six or seven wolves had emerged from the forest a month or so back and had started hanging around. At first their presence was a concern, but they seemed oddly disinterested in either him or in the goats and chickens that might otherwise have been supposed an easy hunt. Silver, on the other hand, had been particularly excited by their arrival - running first to greet them, showing now aggression and then submission, then running back to him for support. Occasionally she would disappear into the forest with them, only to return some hours later, either in company or alone. Finally she made her choice. He could see her struggle with that choice, saw it in her eyes as she hesitated, looking back at him, but she had gone off with them one last time and had not come back.

He understood why she had made that choice. She did not belong with him really - she belonged with her own kind running wild in the mountains up north or wherever it was they went. A very large part of him was happy for that. It was certainly a better fate than that of poor Roscoe, which still pained him to contemplate. But still he felt empty inside. He had his little farm at Homestead Bend with its handful of penned animals, and there was Nightshade, the black mare whose domestication had proven to be both successful and very useful, but it was not the same - not quite enough to stave off the loneliness he was beginning to feel. The human soul was not meant to exist alone. It had evolved to be part of a group, to use language for communication as well as for thought, to progress through cooperation and through competition. If he continued the way he was there was a danger he would lose the very thing he had been brought to this world to represent. And if he shared anything at all with those who had brought him here then they would have known that.

"If you want to know what it is to be human," he spoke out loud, aware that he was only addressing the clouds, "then you're going about it the wrong way." It had become something of a habit recently, directing soliloquies to the Hosts as if praying to gods. If nothing else it helped keep language alive in his own mind, to preserve some part of his humanity. "You won't learn much if you only learn it from me."

He was not sure if these frequent attempts at prayer were understood or even heard. There had never been any sign that they were.

Previously when loneliness and despair had threatened to swamp him he would find a new project or challenge to occupy his mind. There was certainly no shortage of those. He was engaged in a continuous process of renovating and extending the cabin. With the aid of Locomotor he had managed to engineer and manufacture a hinged door, shuttered windows and a shingled roof. He had also furnished the abode with a table, chairs and a large stone firebox that he could use as hearth, oven, stove and kiln. On the farm he was involved in both horticulture and husbandry on a scale sufficient for his own needs. Rarely any more did he have to hunt or forage in the woods across the river. He was able to maintain a modest but varied vegetable garden, small plots of corn and wheat and had even planted a little grove of fruiting trees, including apples and oranges. There were no seasonal crops here, there being no seasons. Anything that grew at all grew whenever and wherever it could. While some of the deciduous trees lost their leaves they seemed to do so according to an internal logic of their own, not constrained by time of year or changing environment.

During that time he had made increasingly distant sorties into the surrounding country, and was engaged in an ongoing effort to accurately map these regions. He'd travelled along the southern coast far enough to convince himself this was at the least a small continent rather than a large island, far enough indeed that rude measurements of the discernibly elongated shadow cast by the noon sun had confirmed to a first approximation his suspicion that this planet was very Earthlike, at least in terms of size. These excursions had also located some potentially useful resources in the form of chunks of the ores of iron, copper and tin scattered on or near the ground over vast areas of stony flat. Their presence was a further hint to the Earthlike quality of this world. Planets with so large a variety of elements readily accessible at the surface were both unusual and highly prized as places that might be easily adapted for human habitation, and were also recognised as a necessary prerequisite for the genesis of native life. He had immediately begun devising plans for future projects by which some of this material might be smelted and forged. There were even nuggets of gold, both sizeable and numerous, in the same area. He imagined that these might be useful as well - if he could think of something to use them for. It amused him to recall that there had been periods of his life when gold was thought so rare and valuable that a person might spend years searching for a few flecks of it, and other times when it was considered a disposable waste, when whole dwellings might be build of solid bricks of purified gold just to avoid the effort of throwing them away.

He'd travelled north in search of the terramine seen so briefly from Bear Hill. He had found it again but the way towards it was blocked by rugged and mountainous terrain in that region. He would not have been able to approach too closely in any case as the place, by all appearances, was still alive and active, and therefore extremely hazardous - embodying the great paradox by which the power to destroy is a necessary requirement for any act of creation. He did, however, find what he was really seeking there near the source of the Swift River - deposits of lumina. This was a byproduct of the terramine as it went about the process of rendering a planet suitable for life and sustaining it in that state - a most unnatural substance, but useful. It stored energy safely within its intricate molecular matrix, releasing it slowly in the form of a soft grey light or, if applied properly, as heat or electric charge.

He'd set up a permanent shack by the Swift River at Eden and even managed to re-enter the Eden Tower with the help of a rickety ladder constructed from bamboo. Under the light of a makeshift lumina torch he'd crawled back inside and looked around, but the result was a disappointment. The place which once had sustained his developing form for many years, nurturing and nourishing him, reconstituting his very being, body and soul, from nothing more than transmitted blueprints, was dark and manky and smelly, smaller than it had felt that first day, infested with cockroaches and other insects feasting on the organic detritus that lay mouldering in its interior. He could see the remnants of what must once have been a remarkable mechanism, tubes and wires, feed tanks and control systems, an odd fusion of organics and mechanics. None of it was of any use to him any more. It had been placed there for only one purpose, and that purpose now accomplished it could, like an old eggshell, be discarded.

These journeys had been made all the easier with the assistance of Nightshade whom he'd successfully managed to break and saddle, enabling him to traverse much greater distances across suitable terrain, and carrying heavier loads, than would have been possible on foot.

Yet among all the tasks yet to be attempted or completed there was one that continued to haunt him, one that fear and mental trauma had prevented him from facing for almost two years, yet which was constantly at the back of his mind. What was once, and was still, the false dawn in the early hours of the morning - the enigmatic dome beyond the western plain. Beyond Bear Hill.

That was a mystery he was determined to tackle once more.

-Day 1058

It was to be the first foray any significant distance to the west in the two years since the attack at Bear Hill. He would take a different route, away from the river and further to the south this time in order to find an easier pass across the high ridge - or so he kept telling himself. It was true enough, but certainly not the only reason. By mid morning he had completed final chores, including saddling up Nightshade with several day's supplies and opening the pen gates to let the sheep and goats roam free if they wished - which he always did before starting a journey of indeterminate length, in the sure knowledge that they would be easy enough to locate on his return. He also spent a good half hour loading and charging Thunderbuss as a precautionary preparation.

The weapon had been received nearly two years before, sometime shortly following his return from Bear Hill, appearing as a long white cylinder that he noticed only on venturing from the cabin after a full three days respite. He had taken it back inside and carefully scraped away the packaging. What he found looked like a cross between a wide barrelled shotgun and a water pistol, complete with a reservoir to be filled with water. The butt held several unlabelled dials, a turn handle clearly intended for manual operation and the abstract designs offering a description in a language he did not understand, its somewhat antique appearance belying vastly more subtle operations beneath the surface. He'd seen things vaguely similar before, even used them once or twice back in the day - back on Earth - for casual skeet and target shooting. Those had been able to manufacture their own ammunition, bullets made of ice, from nothing more than water and energy, and he assumed this one worked on the same principle - no doubt a very complex principle but neatly contained within the small body of the device.

At the time it had seemed like a fawning, almost pathetic attempt to compensate him for the ordeal they had put him through - perhaps an apology of sorts. But he had seen the logic of it. There were real dangers here, he had been aware of that the whole time, and an effective defence against some of those dangers made sense. Now he carried it with him everywhere, fully fuelled and at least partially charged. And it was effective. When he tried it several days after receiving it, learning its operation through a combination of intuition, the memory of similar mechanisms and trial and error, he found it was more than able to deliver a projectile in a way that was both accurate and potentially lethal from several hundred metres. It also issued a loud report, unnecessarily loud given the technology it embodied, which proved its effectiveness by seriously spooking the animals around that first practice shot, including Silver and himself. That sound, together with its artistically flamboyant old style appearance, had suggested the name he gave it.

Thunderbuss was the last assistance gift he had been presented with. In the two years since the Bear Hill incident and the receipt of the weapon there had not been the slightest tangible hint of the Hosts' existence. For all he could tell they had abandoned him entirely at that time, though he would not have gambled on it.

The untried route to the southwest proved to be an easy ride and Nightshade seemed to be taking well to her new saddle and saddlebag, but the cloud cover of the morning had descended to the ground and by early afternoon had become a moderately thick fog - enough to reduce long distance visibility. He pressed on regardless, feeling the direction by instinct, and by late in the afternoon the high hills emerged ahead, silhouetted in the fog. Moreover his hunch had paid off - an easy mountain pass was visible as a void between the taller peaks. It was there that he set camp for the night.

-Day 1059

The fog had still not lifted by the morning but he broke camp and pressed on, keen for an early start. As hoped the pass between the high hills was a relatively gentle ascent followed by an equally gentle descent. Though he was far to the south of Bear Hill, he could not but be mindful of the last time he had ventured into this region, and the eerily misty vista did not help. He did see what he took to be a mountain cat regarding him curiously from a rocky outcrop. He readied himself with Thunderbuss as a precaution, but the animal quickly lost interest and sauntered off, disappearing into the fog.

When he had crossed to the other side of the ridge he turned to the north and began riding along the foothills. He was now further to the west than he had ever been before, but he did have an idea of what he might look for there. Fixed in his mind from the brief glimpse he'd had of this plain from the top of the ridge was the domed city which was the principal goal of this expedition, but there was also the sprawling structure spread out on the valley floor, inviting exploration and much the nearer mystery to him now. With no visible landmarks to serve as guides he had no choice but to guess the best direction to take to reach it.

He had ridden at a steady trot for several hours before the first sign of something out of the ordinary emerged from the fog - a length of tubing running horizontally along the ground. As he drew nearer other similar tubes began to appear, behind it, and above it, and to the left and right, some rising vertically out of the ground and arching back into the distance, others twisting and snaking around each other at a variety of angles. There were no open ends visible from where he approached - for all he knew it might have been a single strand that joined its own tail, like a continuous loop of yarn that had been screwed into a ball by a giant hand and then discarded. He dismounted Nightshade and walked to the nearest of the sections, feeling it cautiously. It had a roughly circular cross section, as wide across as twice his height, and made from what looked for all the world to be a curved sheet of soft plastic stretched over a scaffold of metal rings and struts that gave support. It was completely transparent, easily allowing visibility both to the inside and to the opposite side, and seemed to be entirely empty. To the touch, the surface was soft and yielding only until its slack was taken up, then it became solid and inflexible. It appeared to be continuous, with no seams, joins or holes anywhere that he could see.

There was no obvious purpose to the structure, though a number of possibilities did suggest themselves. It may have been for the transport of fluids, as piping often is, except the aimless and haphazard orientation of its various parts would seem to rule that out. Or it could have been a container for something, something that needed to be separated from the wider environment, something that was either not yet there or was long gone - or was just invisible to him. Or it might have been nothing more than an enormous work of art, a sculpture intended to stir up a response on an emotional level that he, evidently, did not possess. Whatever its function it was definitely artificial, that much was clear. Its material, its shape. He could think of no process by which such a thing could come into being other than through the activity of intelligence - albeit an intelligence he could not identify and lacking a motive that he could discern. It had always been an open question how to determine whether some structure was the result of an unknown but unintelligent process, or the true product of the activity of a mind. The question never really went away even as humanity's children came to understand what mind actually was and how to distinguish it from everything else. If anything the problem came to be of greater concern when the search for sentient beings not descended from those of Earth began in earnest, when the true scope and power of unguided processes became apparent, and when the corner cases and border cases of a distinction that was anything but binary started to be found among the stars. In any case a simple human such as himself had little hope of understanding the nuanced philosophy of even what was known on the subject, so he was doubly impoverished. Yet for all that, one could always just tell.

There was enough room around the various sections that he was easily able to move deeper into the interior of the structure, walking under or between sections, or even climbing over those that were embedded in the ground to sufficient depth. He did this until he was completely surrounded on all sides by a tangle of pipes and mist. Then, fearing the very real possibility of becoming irretrievably lost in this mysterious structure, he backtracked his way out. Oddly, though, he had no sense of danger here. In fact he felt comfortable and secure in the knowledge that this thing represented mind and purpose despite not understanding either of them, like a child in the company of trusted adults.

He mounted Nightshade once more and commenced a methodical circumnavigation of the massive structure. From all sides it appeared more or less the same - occasionally a pipe would branch at a Y or an X junction, occasionally an extended section would stretch out on its own before curving back or penetrating the ground, requiring a long detour, occasionally some especially noteworthy landmark appeared that he felt might be useful as a navigational aid should the need for that arise, but nothing provided any further clue as to the purpose of the thing. Disoriented by fog and monotony he was unsure how far around he was able to get in the remaining daylight. Eventually darkness came, and with it light drizzle. He made himself an uncomfortable camp huddled beneath one section of pipe that rose up and arched sharply overhead, but not before thinking of a name for this new addition to his world and noting it in his journal. Near to his home on OldEarth had been a building called the Jimitry, a kind of mausoleum for the burial of high ranking village elders, but also a labyrinth meant to be explored in the quiet contemplation of life's mysteries. Though somewhat smaller in scale and constructed mostly of timber and stone, its system of interlocking tunnels and serpentine archways was vaguely reminiscent of the structure he was sheltering under that evening, and the emotions it evoked made the name feel all the more appropriate. He half expected some secret of this place to reveal itself in the dark, some source of light to shine out from the innards of the structure or bounce around through the tangle of transparent tubes, but it did not. The only light to penetrate the night came from his own lumina lamp, and that disappeared entirely when he covered it up.

-Day 1060

Both rain and fog dispersed during the night and he woke to a blue sky broken only by a few patchy cloud banks. As the sun rose its light reflected through the clear quasi-plastic pipes of the Jimitry bringing more of its size and tangled structure into a single view. He was also able to orient himself once more to his intended direction of travel. To the west, a row of trees marked the position of a stream and beyond that the gentle slope of a small hill. He stopped briefly by the stream to quench his thirst and make an entry in his journal - in which he named the place Shallow Stream as an accurate description - before wading across and continuing up the hill on foot.

It was an easy climb and he reached the summit with a sense of anticipation, hoping - almost expecting - to see a vast domed city spread out on the leeward side. It was there, a black on white arch, like polished marble set against the blue sky. Yet it appeared no closer than he remembered it looking from the top of Bear Hill - like a rainbow, retreating from him even as he approached. Like a mirage. So similar did it appear in his memory to the last, and only other, time he had seen it that he felt a brief but palpable twinge of fear as he recalled the events that immediately followed that occasion. It couldn't be a mirage, it was too clean to be a mirage. Something else was wrong. The clouds, small fluffy clouds were blowing in on a strong northerly breeze skimming the line of the sky, behind the low hills in the distance.

They were in front of the dome.

For the briefest of moments he could feel his mind vacillate back and forth as he tried to reinterpret the scene. Suddenly he shifted the scale of his perception, and reeled as everything fell neatly and instantly into place. "You've got to be kidding me!" he cried out loud throwing his arms up. Then he began laughing. He sat down on the grass and then lay on his back still laughing, but feeling very pleased he was here alone, with nobody to witness his utter stupidity. That was no domed city in front of him, no artefact or mechanism or crystalline sculpture wrought by the will of beings unknown for purposes unknown.

It was the moon.

He remained there on the summit of the hill for several hours gazing out over the sparsely wooded forest on the other side and the visage of the partial lunar disk that lay beyond that, confirming and contemplating this new revelation. Though he knew it was useless and foolish, he could not help but feel embarrassed and ashamed at having been taken in by so simple an illusion, and tried to construct a rationale that might explain the error. Had he not seen that disk only once before, and under unusually clear conditions, and only for a moment before being mauled by a bear? Its unusual size and colouring, the stark contrast within its streaked black and white surface set against the green of the surrounding landscape - it would be enough to fool anyone. And had he not convinced himself long ago that no satellite orbited this world - indeed that nothing at all shone in the night sky? A respectable moon would show itself now and again if it existed, not sit in the one spot, just as a proper night sky would have at least some stars. His whole perception had been thrown into disarray by these anomalies. And was his mind not already primed by the hope, perhaps not entirely conscious, that what he was seeking would turn out to be a city or a township, a populated place that would end his solitude.

But no - none of that served to excuse him. He had lived a long time in many places and had seen celestial configurations of many kinds, including satellites locked into synchronous orbits. On Kruger, his first home off Earth where he had lived and worked for over a hundred years, the sun itself hung motionless in the sky. He had been on worlds whose natural moons loomed large and beamed bright. There were other signs too - the rapid onset of night, the pre-dawn light in the western sky and the way its presence or absence varied with the clouds, the distance he'd needed to travel before finding its source. These observations now had an explanation. They had always had an explanation, but he had missed it.

He took a journal from his pack and began a new entry;

"Wednesday, December 10, 02: Afternoon. ... with the discovery of this moon several mysteries fall, and several others open up. I will call it Lune after the fashion of satellites everywhere."

He continued to watch as that segment faded to near invisibility in the glare of the afternoon sun, and then as the sun itself sank behind it over the span of only minutes, leaving a slowly fading crimson arc in the starless black void of the night sky.

"As far as east is from west, so far are our sins removed from us." (Psalm 103:12)

-Day 2324

It was not by any means for the first time that the man camped atop LuneView Hill and roused himself in the early hours of the morning to watch the partial face of Lune light up. From about an hour before sun-up the moon's bright visage would begin to appear above the distant hills just as if it were truly rising in the west. At first it came as a single sliver of light in what was otherwise a void of total black. When, after just a few minutes, it had reached its full height - a broad, flat arc peering above the skyline - the hills in front and even the very sky around it seemed to brighten in its presence. At times it appeared streaked with silver bands that enhanced its aura. At other times it showed little more than a dark surface - not truly black but a singular dark green - which nevertheless shone like polished crystal in the reflected light of the sun. Then, barely minutes later, an odd purple discolouration would begin to creep across the face, starting at the top and moving slowly down in a dull band, followed in turn by a huge black bite, as if a giant rat might be nibbling the very moon, piece by piece, out of the sky. When at last the entire segment had been consumed and the land around had again been plunged into darkness, a soft ruddy glow in the east would herald the start of the new day. He had watched the sequence unfold many times over the previous three years, but on this morning, in those moments of dark before the coming of the true dawn, he came to a decision. When the sun had risen above the eastern skyline he took out a journal as usual and made a brief entry.

"Sunday, June 14, 06: Morning. I am committed. I will take the trip to Ninety Long."

He could not have said what it was that particular morning that made him take so final a resolution, or how he could be sure it was indeed the final one. It was certainly not boredom. There was plenty here to keep him occupied. Neither was it the ever continuing loneliness, though if he was honest the possibility of encountering a settlement or colony somewhere along the way was an attractive one. Mostly, perhaps, it was curiosity - the knowledge that there were still many mysteries to be solved, the sense that there was much more to this world than what he had seen in the six and a half years he had lived on it, the intuition that there was a greater purpose to his being here. To be sure the decision had come at the back of months, probably really years, of weighing the pros and cons of the undertaking he was proposing, of assessing and reassessing the circumstances of his life, of trying to understand the reasons he had come here, and then putting the whole question out of his mind while he went about other projects.

Those other projects included building another cabin, which he rather grandiosely named Jimitry Lodge, on the meadow between Shallow Stream and the Jimitry. He was able to divide time among his three main residences, spending weeks or months at each, even clearing a road of sorts to facilitate easy access between them. He constructed a buggy and harness system for Nightshade so as to transport materials from place to place in bulk. He had managed to extract metals, including copper and iron, from the ores found in the southern regions and was able to forge them into crude tools. Though none of these came close to replacing IceNeedle or the other divine gifts, the steel rimmed wheels he had been able to make for the buggy were remarkably effective. At no time had any of those activities prompted any further assistance from his Hosts. Their willingness to engage with him, little though it ever was, had ended with Thunderbuss, or so it seemed. Perhaps they had simply lost interest. Yet he had to believe that there was a deeper purpose to his existence here, a purpose that lay outside of himself or his own past achievements and immediate goals, a purpose beyond just simple survival, a purpose that was noble and important.

The issue had taken a new perspective over recent months, spurred by his explorations of the Jimitry. The mysterious structure had been sitting there for the three years since its discovery, inviting study and speculation as to its nature and function. He had mapped its outer borders as accurately as he could, observed it from a distance using nearby hills to gain as much elevation as possible and, from time to time, penetrated into its interior until transparent tubes surrounded him on all sides in a confusing twisted mass. Never had he seen it do anything other than sit there, glinting in the sun, inert. Its secrets remained secure. But he was convinced that somewhere in its heart there was a clue to those secrets and was determined to find it.

He selected a path that he felt would take him closer to its centre than ever before, and laid down guide ropes and marker pegs that would allow him to retrace the route out - and back in again if need be - without becoming hopelessly disoriented as he usually did. After well over an hour of working his way around and between the tangle of pipes he found what he took to be the very core of the maze - a wide circular structure topped by a transparent dome from which the rest of the pipes seemed to radiate. It was too tall to see from ground level what, if anything, was inside, and no evident points of entry, but he did eventually manage to climb high enough on structures nearby to get a better view.

It was not empty.

Sitting neatly in the centre of the circular platform and clearly the focus of the whole structure, a large grey-black mass, tall and broad, roughly hemispherical, lying on a bed of coarse, dry soil, almost black but with a clear hint of green behind the black. Though it was impossible to tell with any certainty it did not have the look of the artificial about it, not like the structure of which it was the centre. In fact it looked for all the world like a tightly packed shrubbery, though dried out and dead, and the more he looked the more convince he was that it was exactly that - some kind of dead vegetation. He also saw that the fabric of the dome appeared to have been torn. A long angular gash ran along part of its surface, jagged edges curling limply down the sides allowing a mixing of environments that, apparently, were not intended to be mixed. Its rough appearance gave the distinct impression of some sort of accident.

There was nothing else around that strange plant to speak of other than the peculiar green dirt and the ruptured dome. It was not part of a garden or conservatory. It was just there, isolated and alone, and very alien. The entire structure seemed to be focused on the dead thing at its heart as if built to contain it, like a tomb, or its living form, like an arboretum. Yet of more interest to him at that moment, more alien than the plant itself or its apparent significance to the builders of the labyrinthine structure that surrounded it, was the colour of the soil.

In the end those investigations had raised many more questions than they had answered. The more he contemplated those questions and the more he watched the daily play of colour across the partial disk of Lune, the more he became sure answers lay with that enigmatic orb sitting stationary on the horizon.

-Day 2549

Preparations for the journey to Ninety Long had been finalised in the previous days; supplies of dried fruit and salted meat, supplies of fresh water in tanned waterskins, a good stock of clean journals and ink, rope, tools - axe, spade and mattock - and Thunderbuss, divided and stowed between buggy and saddlebag. All assistance gifts were there with the exception of the LocoMotor, and even that was represented in the construction of the cart. As the sun rose over Jimitry Lodge he took a moment to mark the occasion in a new journal.

"Monday, January 29, 07: Morning. All is ready. The journey begins now."

It felt like something of a mental hurdle to flick the reins and begin the trip, but a mental hurdle only. The first few days would be in familiar country - he even had planned to collect some final supplies of fruit and water at a known spring along the way. But the knowledge that he was leaving behind what he had built with seven years of hard lonely toil, what, in spite of the challenges, he had come to consider home, at least indefinitely and possibly forever, did pull at his emotions in many directions. Of course there was always the chance it would fail completely and he would be back within a month, but he had made a deliberate choice not to think in those terms. There was a brief moment in which the magnitude of this undertaking felt overwhelming, almost enough to make him rethink it. He was putting faith on nothing more than the slimmest of chances that the point on the surface of this world closest to its moon was different from any other point. As a speculation it was an interesting one to be sure, but the reality meant a journey, he had estimated, of ten thousand kilometres to find out. Ten thousand kilometres until what was now a partial disk peeking up from behind distant hills was full and clear and directly overhead. And that assumed his calculation of the size of this planet was accurate. With luck it would prove to be an overestimate, but it was just as likely that he would need to go significantly further. The undertaking was almost certain to be arduous, and was very likely not possible at all. There was every chance that some natural barrier - an unscalable mountain range, or an uncrossable river, or an ocean - would prevent him reaching the destination. Ten thousand kilometres, he repeated to himself. Ten thousand kilometres of unknown terrain, of unforeseen obstacles and challenges and dangers - and discoveries.

And he could not help but notice the irony of complaining about ten thousand kilometres given the journey his life had already been.

-Day 2562

It was a journey of over a week from Jimitry Lodge before the pilgrim reached the point, at the western edge of a wooded region, beyond which he had never yet ventured. He knew the spot because the last and only other time he had been that far west, several months earlier, he had made a deliberate choice to go no further. Ahead the terrain opened into a wide grassy plain, like savannah. From here every step would be into new territory, and he had already conditioned his mind with the resolution not to falter, not to turn back unless absolutely necessary and only with careful consideration of every alternative. For now, at least, the way ahead was clear enough and looked unproblematic. There was already a path, straight and true and in the right direction and easily able to accommodate Nightshade and her laden cart, trampled by the herds of migrating wildebeest that inhabited much of this and the surrounding region. He had encountered them and used their trails many times before. They were docile enough, requiring only that he move himself and his belongings to one side should he have the misfortune of encountering them coming the other way. And their trails were certainly well trodden, probably having been used for generations. There was a light fog, not enough to inhibit visibility to the middle distance, but enough to cast a ghostly pallor over the landscape.

In many ways, despite being fully aware of stepping into unknown territory, the way ahead seemed comfortingly familiar. For seven years he had been gradually becoming accustomed to a way of life that was as close to his natural state as he had lived since his youth. Only now was that strange reversal starting to feel normal. He had lived in many environments on many worlds and in each of them he had sought to retain some part of his identity, some link to his own past. That desire had made him part of an ever dwindling minority among his peers. Amish settlements like that of OldEarth, his previous home, were rare and getting rarer. For all he knew they might by now have vanished entirely. Yet here he was, without even having asked for it, in an environment as close to that of Earth as he had encountered since leaving his homeworld over five centuries earlier. It had taken seven years and a brazen step into the unknown to recognise just how normal this should have felt.

He had lived two entire lifetimes on Earth. The first of them had been spent acquiring and then utilising the skills he had needed just to survive in a time when survival was not guaranteed and failure to survive was not a choice. That life ended, as did most human lives at the time, in a way that he had not planned and would not have chosen even if he could. What he had chosen was the most audacious gamble - to remove death's ultimate sting, its finality, by having his body preserved with nothing more than the hope, unproven and extremely remote, that a preserved body would be all that was needed to reconstruct the soul. That gamble, in the end, had paid up. His second life was in some ways more relaxed, though in other ways fuller and more complete. He'd travelled widely and experienced more of what the Earth had to offer. He'd seen the places that had once been pristine wilderness, had succumbed to occupation by human civilisation and then returned to wilderness once more as populations retreated. It was one of those places, specifically the coastal hinterland of Eastern Africa, around Tanzania or Mozambique, that was being called to mind here as he made his way through the grasslands. A long forgotten safari in a distant place now reproduced, from what he could recall, with great fidelity.

In fact it seemed that his entire existence on Earth was being rerun here in broad strokes, starting with a period of time where he farmed the land and discovered his place in the world, followed by a leap of faith that led to a new phase in which he explored far and wide and discovered a much grander place in a much bigger world.

-Day 2588

By now the disk of Lune, when the ground was flat and the sky clear, was becoming noticeably higher day by day. It was showing fully half its face above the low grassy hills when six days of cloud cover finally lifted. By that time the days were noticeably shorter and the sudden onset of night, at one time a deep mystery, now fully explained as the sun vanished each afternoon behind the dark face within just minutes, leaving not the slightest hint of dusk other than a thin ring of atmospheric glow highlighting the edge of the lunar orb. The total darkness of an extended night found compensation in the small hours of the morning when that partial disk once more became so brightly lit that it cast an eerie long shadow before every rock and tree, and was sometimes bright enough in contrast to the night sky to make it uncomfortable to look at.

But while some of the mysteries of this world were falling to greater knowledge, many others remained unchallenged. One perpetual question concerned the continued absence of stars from the night sky. Of course that question had been raised each and every time, for the past seven years, he had found himself under clear sky after sundown. But with so many other questions to answer, and so much other work to do, he had deliberately avoided spending too much time thinking about it. He knew only too well the folly of speculating in the absence of evidence, but he also found such speculation a welcome distraction during the long hours of westward trudge. A possibility he had been considering was that he had been intercepted before reaching his destination and currently inhabited an isolated stellar system within the vast gulf between the galaxies. Such systems were known to exist, ejected from the galaxy of their birth and fated to wander alone for eternity. Perhaps that had been considered a suitably neutral territory, a place of safety to mitigate some perceived risk his Hosts felt he might have posed. Or maybe it was only in such a place that a joint effort by those who had sent him and those expected to pick him up could proceed on equal footing, two mutually alien powers merged at the vanguard of their expansion across the cosmos. Cast into the void between the galaxies, set adrift around a lonely sun in an immense ocean of emptiness.

As he continued to trek relentlessly to the west the days began to merge one into the other, into a stream of time punctuated by the natural cycles of light and dark, by blue sky and cloud and occasional rain. The landscape too was a consistent expanse of open grassland and low hills broken only occasionally by a patch of sparse woodland or a shallow stream to cross. By turns he would either ride Nightshade in the saddle, or sit in the cart, or walk behind or in front or along side, holding the reigns, eyes ever fixed on the half dome of Lune. As his body trudged on his mind would wander from speculation about the future and the continuing mystery of his circumstance, to periods of mindful meditation focused on the present moment but otherwise lacking specific content, to a wistful contemplation of the past. He was increasingly aware of how much about the past he missed, the small luxuries of life - a reliable source of food, a comfortable bed, well fitting shoes. Although he'd spent time in the wilds of many places, often seeking them out to live off the land in quiet isolation and soul cleansing austerity, that had always been in the knowledge that he could return to the safety of civilisation at any time. Now he missed the comforting certainties of those times. He missed the simple pleasure of being able to listen to music as he had done often on long lonely journeys with the aid of technology that felt humble at the time but was far beyond anything available here. He wondered if there was any music here, or poetry or art. How much of the shared cultural heritage of his race, he wondered, had been transported with him to this new world? How much of that heritage still existed anywhere other than his own flawed and failing memory of it? Did the Hosts even care about that?

Above all he missed the possibility of human contact. Not even the fact of human company which he had often sought to avoid, but just the possibility of it. There was still the hope that a thriving society of fellow humans would be found somewhere along this journey, and it was that hope in part that kept driving him forward, but it was a hope that had faded with each passing day as it had for the past seven years.

As he thought back over his life it occurred to him that he had never truly been alone. It had often felt like it. Even when part of a population of trillions, as he had been, densities were so low that his nearest neighbour might have been thousands of kilometres distant at any given time. What was more he had often felt he preferred it that way, far away from crowds and bustle. But there had always been someone - a wife or a companion, a group of friends who could be contacted in a moment, or in a week. Sometimes it was little more than a voice, and not always belonging to a fellow human, and sometimes he was not directly part of the conversation, but there had always been some experience of fellowship with a kindred mind.

Here that experience was missing. Increasingly he was feeling, more so now as he continued ever westward than even over the previous seven years, that he was actually alone. And it was becoming disturbing.

-Day 2652

He had spent the night camped at the foot of a low but potentially problematic range of steep and rocky hills. In the morning he spent some time scouting to the north and south looking for an easy pass, but found nothing other than a section that was slightly easier than the rest. He managed the short climb himself with no difficulty and, after a brief reconnaissance of the region, convinced himself that if he was able to coax Nightshade over the roadblock and haul the rest of his belongings after her, the way into the valley on the other side would be easy by comparison. With the aid of ropes, strong words of encouragement and considerable muscle power, he succeeded in pulling the horse up and over the rocks with no injuries or lasting signs of distress, and then spent several hours unpacking everything, lifting the buggy inch by inch to the level summit, carrying up its contents one item at a time and packing everything back again. By the time that had been accomplished the clouds had parted entirely, affording him a clear view of the way ahead and the skyscape to the west. What he saw in that sky was something he had been anticipating, but was nonetheless noteworthy enough to pull open his current journal and make an addendum to the entry he had already penned for that morning:-

"Saturday, May 12, 07: Afternoon. Lune is now entirely separate from the horizon. I see clear space beneath it."

The complete disk was very visible as a mottled dark blue circle on the lighter blue of the sky, with a brilliant white on black crescent crowning the upper edge. Its width, as he found when he checked, covered the full length of his hand, from heel to fingertip, at the end of his outstretched arm. Against the foreground of distant trees and hills it looked positively enormous. In honour of this, admittedly psychological, milestone in his journey he named the spot Full Moon Hill, and decided to camp there to watch the cosmic dance unfold. He watched as the colour contrast between disk and sky faded until they were almost indistinguishable. He watched as the crescent crown slimmed down to a sliver as if being erased by the approach of the sun. Then he watched in darkness as the sun passed behind, only to reappear briefly an hour later as a tiny but brilliant spark in the gap between horizon and moon, and then sink again into a true evening and night. From this point forward that hour would be lost from each day, but at least now, he thought, there will be a respectable period of twilight.

-Day 2655

As long as the sky was free of clouds and the ground free of obstacles, he had been blessed, for now, with as perfect an aid for navigating to his goal as he could wish. And both sky and ground were clear when he started out that morning, the latter being a vast flat plain of spindly grass. When the bright disk of Lune was at its full phase, as it was at daybreak, many of its details and features became clearly visible. The shifting streaks of white and grey which varied in pattern and coverage over the course of days, or sometimes hours, from complete saturation to near absence and everything in between, he had long ago recognised as banks of cloud and systems of weather. He had seen clouds often enough, both from the surface of a planet that produced them and from far above it, to know what they looked like \- the way they flow and swirl and change their shape and distribution, the variations in density and whiteness. Their presence lent a comforting familiarity to what was otherwise a very alien world. When the veil of cloud was lifted, either through favourable conditions or in the eye of his imagination piecing together snippets viewed over time, the surface of that world was revealed.

It was almost entirely black except for fixed regions of blue of various sizes that the man might have guessed were bodies of water - lakes perhaps - except that their edges were indistinct, almost fuzzy against their dark surroundings. Neither was the black itself, on closer and more considered scrutiny, quite as absolute as a cursory glance might have suggested. Instead the surface was divided into large areas of the darkest of dark green separated from equally large areas of the darkest of dark red by borders which were, if anything, more distinct than those around the lakes. They looked like nothing so much as dark green continents on dark red seas - or perhaps vice versa. There were also much smaller spots and blemishes dotted here and there like acne, possibly isolated mountains or other singular surface features. These patterns remained rigidly stationary, not only in relation to each other as would be expected of fixed landmarks, but with respect to him as well, indicating that Lune from his perspective did not spin at all. Both bodies orbited and rotated in perfect lock-step, each one showing the same face to the other at all times. Of course he had noted these things many times since the first time he had seen that face, but now that he was seeing it entirely he felt a renewed urgency in his contemplation of them. And the more he contemplated it the more he began to suspect, aside the dismal and foreboding impression its dark countenance would at first invoke, that Lune was in fact a vital and living place. Not like the generic natural satellites for which it had been named - the dead chunks of rock in orbit around Earth, or OldEarth or most other colony planets he had any knowledge of - this was a world in its own right, with air and storms and, perhaps, an ecosystem of its own. From these and other aspects of its appearance - its size on the sky and its mutually locked daily orbit - together with some rough calculation and even rougher intuition, it seemed evident that this world was not overly dissimilar to NewEarth itself - speaking very broadly of course and notwithstanding the obvious differences. A twinned pair of worlds, neither one a satellite of the other. A true binary.

What was even more noteworthy was the precision with which their mutual orbit about each other aligned with the orbit of both about the sun. That sun followed the same path through the sky every day, moving behind the lunar disk exactly at the top, re-emerging an hour later exactly at the bottom then setting immediately, only to rise again at exactly the opposite point on the horizon. It was a preternaturally precise alignment - suspiciously precise - very unlikely to have occurred and remained stable in the natural formation and evolution of this system. He knew this world had been renovated - altered for the sake of life like himself. He had seen the terramines that did the work. But while altering the surface conditions of a planet was one thing, altering planetary configurations was another thing altogether. Transhuman Authorities, the Overlords and Ubermensch and others of their ilk he had encountered in the past, might well have had the power to move whole planets, but he had not heard of them ever doing it. Usually if they needed to manipulate that amount of matter they would take the planet apart. What power had been invoked to bring these worlds together? And what purpose?

And if NewEarth had been renovated to satisfy the needs of terrestrial life, what of Lune? Was it, too, a renovated world, and if so for what? A thought that had been playing silently in his mind for some time came into consciousness. He had studied the life of alien worlds before. Never directly, of course. That option never had been available to the likes of him. Mostly such life did not reached beyond the level of single cells or simple, slimy colonies of cells. On only a handful of occasions had it complexified and diversified. He had learnt about each of those occasions as best he was able, through books and holofilms and diagrams, through discussions with others who also studied them, also indirectly. Never had he actually seen a living instance of non-terrestrial life for real, with his own eyes, in the flesh. No human ever had. Nor was that mere happenstance, it had been forbidden by principle - a principle called the Laissez-Faire imperative, a principle he had jokingly referred to as the Prime Directive, a principle designed to avoid interference with or contamination of something that was both extremely rare and intrinsically valuable. Valuable not because of what it meant or what use could be found for it. Valuable simply in itself. It was a moral code imposed over the human will by humanity's own successors. And now, if this strange blackened world was what he thought it was, he was as close as any biological human being had ever come to breaking that imperative.

-Day 2758

With heavy cloud lasting for several days and his principal means of navigation thereby unavailable, he was becoming concerned that he might be randomly deviating from the true path. The problem was exacerbated by the need to manoeuvre around patches of tall savannah grass that hindered direct travel and extended far into the distance. But neither did he want to wait until the cloud dispersed. Already in the past week he had several times encountered herds of zebra and, at greater distances, small groups of giraffes and elephants. Though he had seen none yet, he knew that where there were prey there were bound to be predators, and the nights resonated with rustling grass, cackling hyenas and other sounds that made him decidedly anxious. So he kept Thunderbuss primed and charged and at the ready, and made as much haste as he could muster through the open grassland, navigating by instinct and by fixing on distant landmarks, though there were few of these.

He could, in spite of these concerns, not help but be impressed by the variety of animals that had been assembled here. Giraffes and elephants if you please, he thought to himself. He had seen such animals in the wild only once before, in an environment very similar to the one he was in here, while on safari in Africa, on Earth, long long ago. In his own day they had been endangered, sent to the brink of extinction by human exploitation of their habitat, but by the time he had come to see them centuries later they were safe again, rescued by a posthuman philosophy that saw the original state of nature as valuable, like a work of art in a gallery. But a state of nature is not a fixed quantity. It is dynamic, and part of its beauty lies in the way it moves with the passage of longer and longer stretches of time. Possibly these animals did not exist any more even on Earth.

Yet here they were, somewhere which, by the dictates of any reasonable natural order, they had no business being at all. Not to mention the coastal and forest environments back east, and the farm animals, and the horse he was riding. And himself, of course - a clear latecomer to be afforded special attention.

A vague uneasiness came over him, even more so than before. The air, which was already still, had become quiet as well, the usual chatter of birds having ceased as if respectfully waiting for the start of a performance. In the distance a small herd of zebra were moving away with some haste. Even Nightshade was showing signs of agitation.

"Easy girl," he said reassuringly, bringing her to a stop, not feeling particularly reassured himself. He readied Thunderbuss and looked around, senses at attention. In the corner of his eye the yellow grass seemed to come alive, and even as he turned to face it another and a third pale form emerged from their position of stealth. He had only a second to select the nearest of them, take aim and fire a shot before it was on him. A single pellet of ice burst from the barrel of the weapon too fast for the eye to follow, and with it a deafening crack that reverberated across the plain. The first lioness went down at once, tumbling under the momentum of her own lifeless mass until it came to a stop almost at his horse's feet. The other two veered off in fright, barely breaking the speed of their attack but altering its direction to one of retreat. Nightshade, too, startled as much by the suddenness of the attack as by the sound of the gun, gave a buck that almost threw him off, but he had been prescient enough to make sure she was thoroughly acclimatised to the sound at least, and she quickly composed herself. He kept his eyes on the retreating lionesses until they had disappeared into the grass, and looked around for other members of the hunting pride he might have missed, his heart pounding and his senses fired with the adrenaline surge, all the while winding the handle of his weapon to ready another charge. He did not need it. When he was satisfied that the hunters did not intend on returning immediately he signalled swift departure from the area with a flick of the reins, the horse only too willing to comply.

For the rest of the day and for some time after he felt on edge, his mind frequently returning to the last time, on Bear Hill, that he had let his guard down in the presence of a wild animal. He knew he would not feel safe until the veld was thoroughly behind them. Coming close to a small herd of zebras grazing peacefully he made the uncomfortable decision to shoot one of them and leave the carcass as an easy meal in the hope of drawing attention away from himself. He did that with full awareness of what a morally dubious action it was, but it had never been clear what moral rules were applicable to his circumstances. Like a naughty child he could feel the weight of shame take the form of a strong sensation of being watched and judged. Indeed even by the cold light of rational thought there were good reasons to believe he was being observed, and he wondered how his actions were perceived by those who had brought him here. They had seen fit, possibly with some effort and risk, to gather up a range of creatures from what to them was an alien world and replicate their habitat closely enough for them to live and thrive there. It was only an assumption on his part that his own existence was of greater value to them than that of the zebra he had sacrificed, or the lion that saw him as prey. In the end he had to make his own choices. Where responsibility to a higher moral purpose - of which he was only dimly aware - came into conflict with his responsibility to himself, he had to form his own priorities as well. Surely, he thought, the Hosts would understand that.

-Day 2849

The sky had been clear now for two days following over a week of rain, some of which was torrential and included occasional thunderstorms and gale force winds. He had been concerned he would find himself bogged-in until everything dried out, but the gently sloping terrain was not prone to flooding and so he had been able to make good, if uncomfortable, progress through the wet. Now with the sun shining again and Lune showing high in the western sky he was able to realign himself once more with his goal. He was also able to renew his appreciation of the spectacular ritual that played out daily in front of him.

It began at dawn with the rising sun at his back and the face of Lune full and bright before him. Over the course of the morning that face waned from gibbous through half, and by noon it had reduced to a neat crescent arched across the sky. If he stared at it for long enough, fixing attention on some surface feature or other for reference, he fancied he could perceive the change in that shadow as actual motion. It was several hours after that, at about three in the afternoon by the standard reckoning, that the real show began. That was when the sun slid behind the now darkened disk leaving a thin, rapidly fading crimson ribbon as its last rays bounced around through a layer of atmosphere, and plunging both worlds into darkness. Even when the bulk of the spectacle was marred by cloudy days he knew that time had arrived by the false night that suddenly fell and the small but perceptible drop in temperature that accompanied it. He recalled that everywhere else he had lived a total solar eclipse was a rare and special event, a cause of wonder and marked by ceremony and celebration. On OldEarth in particular, among the amish colonists who had occupied that world for millennia, an eclipse of the sun had been steeped in myth and symbolism. It felt rather fitting, if only coincidentally, that much of that symbolism also involved the place he now lived. Here they were a daily occurrence, and had even become something of a nuisance, depriving his surroundings of visibility for some part of what should have been daylight hours.

That false night lasted only an hour or so, and during that time both the world around him and the world above him gradually took on ghostly pastel colours as light from the shifting sun, though still hidden from view, started to illuminate the globe to the distant west and reflect back against the moon. That part of the show ended with the telltale blood red ribbon on the underside of the shadowy grey orb, followed by a tiny pinprick of brilliant light and a second, upside-down dawn.

The day would then proceed as normal, the afternoon glare uncomfortable even under a broad rimmed hat as he continued relentlessly westward. When true night fell and the last dim light of dusk faded away, the thin crescent moon dominated not only the western sky but the whole visible world. It looked like a bright but flimsy bowl supporting the ethereal weight of the remaining lunar disk, which appeared as a pale grey shadow against the thick starless black of the night sky. If he felt like sleeping or his horse needed rest that was the time to do it, knowing it would be a good few hours before the path ahead became visible again. But as the lunar crescent waxed towards fullness the surrounding landscape gradually brightened once more until by the small hours of the morning the surrounding countryside could be seen in complete, if slightly off coloured detail. If the day was robbed of an hour's light that was more than adequately compensated nightly by the full face of Lune.

It was then, at about three in the morning, that the second half of the diurnal skyshow began. A curved purple stripe separating the full bright region beneath from a coal black umbra above would pass slowly across the lunar surface from top to bottom, taking about an hour to traverse the distance. In its wake the variegated light-on-dark texture of the surface vanished deep into shadow. When it reached the lower edge the sky was about as dark as it ever got. Now the only visible thing was a faint penumbral ring where the bright full moon had hung only an hour before, prominent only in contrast to the otherwise totality of darkness. Occasionally a thunderstorm would be visible as brief flashes of light here and there on the black surface, and curved ribbons of colour circling the poles to the left and right revealed the presence of aurorae. At other times, when the surface was especially clear of clouds, he thought he could make out fainter and more stable points of light, as if stars had been moved from where they should have been to where they shouldn't - as if the lunar face had become a portal to a more normal part of space. Try as he might to resist he could not help but speculate, with just a glimmer of hope, about what those points of light might represent. Each of these observations offered a hint, albeit a tantalisingly small one, to what kind of a world that was. The phase of total dark lasted only a few minutes before the purple stripe, this time curved the other way and this time leading the expanding marble patterned crescent, moved in from the top. The whole show from start to end was over within two hours. Lune was full once more and remained so even as the brightening eastern sky signalled a new day, and the whole sequence started over again.

-Day 2928

"Tuesday, February 18, 08. Midday. I'm calling it today. Lune is at forty-five degrees."

The huge body of the satellite hung rigid in the sky - its slow ascension over weeks and months inextricably linked to his own motion along the ground. Now it was, as near as could be told, halfway from horizon to zenith, meaning that he had reached the point halfway to his destination. He had made the assessment using a makeshift sextant he had cobbled from straight lengths of waratah stalk from a lush region several weeks earlier. He had constructed the thing precisely so that he could make just this kind of measurement, though truth to tell it was primarily to while away endless hours in the saddle. He was well aware that it was not the most accurate of instruments, but it was accurate enough to fix milestones in his own mind and for his own records, however those records might ever be used, confident that they were not too far wrong. And it was proving to have other uses as well.

He had taken to observing the small fixed features on the surface of Lune, at those times when it was not obscured by the clouds of either world, and trying to construct hypotheses about their nature. He mapped each one carefully in his journal, observed as best he could how their appearance might change with time and circumstance, and even named some of them. There was Grand Australis, the dominant continental mass of the southern hemisphere, which was on the left from his perspective. There was Mare Aquilis or Blue Sea, the largest and most central of the six or so isolated blue regions, and Raindrop Archipelago, a collection of what appeared to be small islands of dark green land on a dark red sea running along the equator, which was top to bottom and so looked to be falling from the main continent. There was the Great Mid Range, a prominent variation in the colour of Grand Australis which divided it neatly into western and eastern halves, and which he took to be a range of tall mountains because of the way it seemed to influence the flow of clouds, and the way it played with the passing terminator which separated night from day on that world.

There was also an odd little blemish that he had initially overlooked, but which had come to hold a particular fascination. He called it the Small Brown Spot, an accurate reflection of both its size and colour in comparison to the surrounding region. It had a number of features that had drawn it to his attention over a period of several days' observation. Firstly it was cleanly circular in shape. Of course that was difficult to know for sure given its small size, but it seemed to lack the irregular border of other surface features giving it an unnatural appearance. Secondly, it sat very neatly on the divide between two of the major masses of near black - the dark green of Grand Australis on the left, and the even larger mass of dark red to the right, which was north. Whatever those colour variations might signify, that placement seemed to be purposeful. Like the Mid Range mountains far off to the south-west, it appeared to have an effect on the patterns of cloud and weather around it, and looked to be casting a particularly long shadow at the appropriate times of day when conditions were clear enough to see it. Moreover when the clouds in its vicinity were calm it often even appeared above them, a clear brown dot on a field of white. All of this suggested its true size was very large for such an isolated thing. And when the surrounding surface was darkened by shadow or night, it was that spot which most often marked concentrations of faint points of light nearby. Finally there were recent measurements which placed it almost, but not quite, at the very centre of the disk from his point of view, and subsequent very rough calculations suggesting the deviation was more due to his own position than its. If those estimates were correct, he surmised, by the time he reached his destination at Ninety Long that spot would be at the exact point on the surface of Lune closest to him.

-Day 2953

The traveller and his horse had come upon it suddenly in the late afternoon after crossing a flat, semi-arid region populated by cactus and red desert pea, with the occasional thorny lizard, prairie dog and vulture.

Its appearance that afternoon was rather apropos, coming as it did after several days in which the focus of his contemplation was on just how monotonous his journey had become. Even the sight of Lune hanging before him in the sky was seeming altogether too familiar. He had long ago established that NewEarth was a manufactured planet, a construction engineered under intelligent control to suit a purpose. That purpose included habitability by himself and the other terrestrial life around him. But this conclusion was increasingly one that required an effort of will to maintain. More and more he was slipping into a mode of thinking that this was his true home, that he had originated here, that he belonged here. On every other place he had ever lived there had been clues to the presence of minds other that his. Even Earth had roads and farms and houses, to say nothing of densely populated towns and cities. This place had been meticulously designed to appear raw and pristine as if sculpted by nature alone before he had arrived to spoil it. He had only begun to consider whether that impression constituted a delusion that he himself was responsible to correct, or a deception that the Host had intended in direct violation of the most sacrosanct of moral principles, when he noticed it.

From the distance it stood out against the grey clouds low on the skyline, though higher than the other more expected features and somewhat more northerly than his journey would otherwise have taken him. He knew almost immediately what it probably was, and that it would be worth a brief detour to investigate, but chose to leave that until the following morning. He made camp, fed and watered the horse, and in fading twilight noted the discovery in his journal.

"Saturday, March 13, 08: Evening. I have found what looks to be another artefact similar to the Jimitry. A bit off track, but tomorrow I will take a closer look."

-Day 2954

Even from a distance, as he approached in the morning, he could tell this object was different from the one back east. It was roughly the same size, apparently spanning a few kilometres, and similarly made up of a haphazard tangle of wide transparent tubes that arched and twisted in all directions, penetrating the ground and towering into the air and glinting in the morning sun. But while that one had been empty and inanimate, in this one there appeared to be something moving. Subtle shifts of shade and colour appeared to flow along many of the pipes, movements that were not, he could tell, due to his own motion or to anything blowing in the breeze. As he came closer he could see that each tube contained countless granules whose concentration varied from place to place and from moment to moment along its length. Closer still and these granules resolved into individual objects, like insects crawling about on the inner surface or flying within each pipe. And they seemed to be responding to his approach.

He stepped up and placed a hand on the transparent fabric. It felt solid initially, requiring considerable force on his part before it showed any sign of flex, as if supported by internal pressure. Almost immediately a large number of the creatures swarmed to the print of his hand, creating a neat outline of the palm and fingers on the inner wall of the tube. He looked closely at them as they jostled one another - moving up and down, landing and flying off, and swapping places in the most intricately choreographed dance. Superficially they might have been thought to look like honeybees, or perhaps wasps, though the most cursory of further inspection was enough to show they looked nothing like either of those other than in general size and bulk. They were mainly green in colour and had a slightly elongated shape, but beyond that he could make nothing out with any clarity. They were moving much too fast to see any details. He surmised they must have wings to propel themselves the way they did, and also that they had eyes of some sort - unless there was another mechanism at play allowing them to sense his presence.

He backed away from the tube. The print of his hand formed by the wasps remained for a moment before dissolving back into the swarming mass. Collecting Nightshade by the reins he started walking around the outer perimeter of the labyrinthine structure. The wasps followed him at every step - not so much individually, he observed, but as a wave of collective activity within the bulk mass of the swarm. Indeed they seemed to be mimicking his form and movement, and that of his horse. The effect was subtle and hard to distinguish from his own heightened imagination, but the more he watched the more convinced he was of seeing striding legs, bobbing head and trailing cart in the mass of wasps within the pipes. Neither was their motion otherwise entirely random. Rather there were hints of pattern and structure that emerged from the combined bodies of large numbers of the creatures acting in unison - structures that flowed in spirals and pulsations, cycling and repeating, or almost repeating, and spreading out in waves.

He had no idea what he was looking at. This was one of the few occasions in the years he had lived on this planet that he had encountered something he was not able to fit within the context of his own experience and understanding. He could not even tell if these creatures were a form of biological life or an artefact, a product of evolution or design. He knew enough to know that this distinction was not always a well defined one, but he also knew that in this case it may have been important. At least now the Jimitry he had already found near his home in the east had been given some semblance of function - it was a container for something not intended to roam free in his environment. He reasoned also that if two of these structures had been discovered on what was essentially an arbitrary track, they were very probably common across the planet.

As the afternoon eclipse approached the wasps departed as if anticipating the darkness, leaving the tubes empty and deserted, only to reappear an hour later when the sun returned. He spent the remainder of the afternoon exploring the surrounding area. A sizeable body of water overlapped with part of the structure, many of its pipes running just beneath the surface or descending vertically into the depths. He tested the water and, finding it potable, took the opportunity to fill the water skins and quench his own thirst and Nightshade's. Finding some ripe blueberries, date palms and young grass shoots growing along the edge of the lake, as well as a good supply of dry tinder and firewood, he decided this would be a good place to rest up for a day or two, and to investigate further this most remarkable find.

And as he prepared his campsite in the strangely shifting shadow of a wasp filled length of transparent pipe, he could not shake the impression that he wasn't the only one that afternoon observing a new discovery.

-Day 2955

He was especially curious to find what lay at the heart of this twisted mass of insect infested tubes. The one back east was inert and sterile, but even there he had felt the structure's core held more than merely geometric significance. Rousing himself before dawn he began scouting the perimeter for a place that he felt would afford the best chance of getting all the way through the labyrinth without becoming lost. The pipe maze was almost empty of wasps at that time. They had departed gradually at sunset much as they had done during the eclipse the previous day, as if seeking a place to roost for the night. By the time he had found a suitable spot the sun was well up and the wasps had returned and were once more attending him closely. Using his longest lengths of rope as a guide to the return path he made his way into the thicket. By the time the rope had run to its full length he was surrounded on all sides by a tangled array of pipes filled with wasps that were continually forming and re-forming their bulk mass into a dazzling, almost mesmerising display. It may have been only his imagination, but he was sure their behaviour was more frenetic than it had been the previous day, and was becoming more so as he penetrated deeper, and that impression made him slightly uneasy. Nevertheless he ignored that instinct and indeed made a decision which, even as he made it, he knew was foolhardy - he left the trailing end of the guide rope and continued unguided towards the heart of the maze.

Eventually he found it, more the result of good fortune than he would like to have admitted. It was, as far as he could tell, identical in structure to the core of the Jimitry - a broad, raised, domed platform, exposed to the open sky and the late morning sun above, from which radiated several pipes that in turn branched out to form the rest of the labyrinth. But this one was alive with activity and movement.

He clambered over pipes and up the side of the platform to get a better view of the domed plateau, ignoring the swarms of wasps that seemed to track and imitate his every movement. The interior of the dome was so dense with the seething mass of insects it contained that it was difficult seeing through them to any depth. They almost seemed to be arranging themselves to block his view. Occasionally they reduced in concentration just enough for him to catch a glimpse of the floor of the dome, a carpet of darkest green soil similar in appearance though more vital and healthy looking than what he had seen previously at the Jimitry. He felt sure that somewhere in there was a fixed central structure that was the focus of their attention and that corresponded to the dead thing he had found back east. A hive like that of bees, or a nest of wasps. This entire structure was housing for the Nest that he assumed existed at its core.

The wasps continued to swarm over the inner surface of the dome, but not haphazardly. Rather, they seemed to be intricately organised, displaying patterns of almost artistic design, and not at the surface only. As far into the depth of the swarm as he could see there was organised structure, like an abstract dynamic sculpture rendered in three dimensions. An odd feeling of deja vu came over him as he realised that the swirls and ripples and starbursts being displayed resembled something very familiar. It took a moment for the connection to become clear in his mind, and in a bid to confirm it he pulled IceNeedle from his belt and examined the hilt and the blade. Even then the conclusion seemed scarcely plausible.

"That can't be," he murmured to himself as he looked at the blade again. The mysterious emblems adorning his knife and each of the other tools he had been given did indeed seem to be renderings, albeit static and projected onto the item's two dimensional face, of the behaviour of this mass of swarming insects.

The wasps seemed to become sluggish, their frenetic motions slowing considerably and the patterns that emerged from those motions becoming more regular and rhythmic. Moments later the sky darkened and the ambient temperature dropped as the afternoon eclipse began. Within minutes he was plunged into almost total darkness - almost, save for an eerie light emanating from somewhere deep within the tangled pipes around him. If anything that light, playing as it did with the slowly undulating bulk motions of the wasps, unnerved him more than total darkness might have. He knew it was foolish, but there was something unavoidably creepy about this place in the dark, the primal fear of unseen spectres and phantoms that haunted more superstitious times rising unbidden in his mind. He had felt it often in his eight years in this world, but not yet as strongly as now. In this case, he thought, those phantoms were not entirely imagined.

He sat huddled on the ground for the hour it took the sun to pass behind Lune, not even attempting to feel his way through the maze. When the sun returned the wasps quickly resumed a higher level of activity, and he chose to make haste in finding his way out lest he be forced to spend a full night here in the dark. He knew the growing sense of disquiet he felt at that prospect was misplaced. These wasps seemed to have little capacity to do him harm, certainly not in their present circumstance. Indeed he was probably safer here at night than out among the nocturnal denizens of his own world. But the rationality of this case did nothing to ease his mind and he quickly began to seek an exit as soon as it was light enough to see.

It was not long before an earlier error became all too apparent. He had become disoriented, and with an increasing frustration realised he had lost the easy way out. There was no real fear in that realisation - he knew he would eventually work his way out - but he had no wish to spend a full night in that place. Through his desperation he became dimly aware that the behaviour of the wasps within the pipes had subtly changed. They seemed to be sweeping past him, slowing as they approached and speeding up as they moved away, adjusting the density of their distribution and the orientation of the patterns that emerged from their cumulative activity, but always suggestive of a particular direction. Playing a hunch he followed that direction, and within half an hour had found the end of the guide rope left earlier in the day. No sooner did he have it in hand than the pointed behaviour of the wasps ceased and they reverted to their previous styles of activity - abstract motifs, geometric forms, and shadowy imitation of himself.

The sun had already set when he emerged to find Nightshade where he had left her, calmly grazing by the edge of the lake.

-Day 2993

It had been over a month since his encounter with the Nest, and though he had spent a good deal of time thinking about it the significance of that discovery continued to elude him. The last week of that month had been spent traversing a vast salt plain, a desolate region devoid of life and shade and drinkable water - a flat, featureless sea of white lacking even a hill on the horizon to look at. The few puddles of water were thick and brackish and crusted with salt. Even Nightshade, usually stoic in the face of all the trials she had been put through, was showing signs of concern. It had been his plan from the start to use only half the rations he was able to obtain from any source before finding a new one to replenish them. If he could not replenish supplies in that time he would turn back. That was the plan. He was dangerously close to that limit. Indeed he was afraid he may have already overstepped it and was seriously considering the difficult option of abandoning this route and returning to the last known oasis. But a shimmer on the distant ground had broadened from what might have been a mirage to an unmistakable body of water, and by midday he was standing on a shore that extended as far as he could see to the north and south, and overlooked a clean blue rippling surface at least as far as the western horizon. It was with profound disappointment that he drew the first and most obvious conclusion. His unspoken dread for the previous year had eventuated \- Ninety Long was to be unattainable, blocked by the western edge of the landmass he was on and a great stretch of ocean beyond it.

But there was a small glimmer of hope.

He tasted the water. While it was not as fresh as he might have wished, neither was it the concentrated brine he would have expected from the open sea. At a pinch both he and Nightshade may be able to tolerate drinking small quantities. Better than dehydration, he thought. He considered a number of possible explanations for this - maybe it was being diluted by the delta of a freshwater river nearby, or maybe this planet's oceans did not comply with his expectation of them, or maybe, just maybe, this was after all only a large lake, its slight salinity just incidental run-off from the surrounding plain. What's more there was life here - mussels clinging to the rocky shallows and some good sized trout skimming the underside of the surface just offshore. And life meant food enough for an extended investigation. He stripped off and jumped into the water to freshen his skin and wash the dust and salt out of his hair. It was cool and welcoming, but he did not stay long nor swim too far, mindful of the possibility of crocodiles and other dangers in what was an unknown expanse of water. Then he noted the discovery as a journal entry.

"Thursday, April 23, 08: Afternoon. I have found an inland sea which may or may not put an end to this trip. I will take the chance and try to skirt around it. It only remains to decide which direction."

In the event he chose to go south, not for any particular reason. Then, as had become his habit at any major point of detour, he marked the spot with a pile of rocks large enough to be both permanent and obvious, and set out in the hour before the afternoon dark.

-Day 3019

The shoreline of the Great Lake had curved quite sharply around to the west, and he was becoming more and more hopeful that his designation of this body of water would prove accurate. He'd come a long way from his chosen path to reach that point. By the time he'd begun travelling west once more, the elongation of his shadow at noon had become noticeable, as had the angle from the vertical at which the eclipsed sun disappeared, and reappeared, behind the lunar disk. Certainly going south had been a good choice - the detour had been an easy one. The terrain was mostly level and reasonably free of obstructions, and fresh water streams often drained into the lake, and sources of food were abundant along the shore in that direction. There were frequent groves of tropical fruiting trees - bananas and mangos, even pineapples - and he was occasionally successful in pulling a feed of fish from the lake itself. Once again he was struck by the diversity of life that had come to infest this world and had managed to adapt to it. Coming as it did, the swing to the west had been fortuitous for other reasons as well. The landscape further south rose sharply into alpine peaks that, even at a distance, he could see were capped with snow. They were probably impassable.

But now he was confronted with a new obstacle. It was in the late afternoon when he came to the bank of a river flowing out of the mountains in the south and into the Great Lake. It was broad and deep and would not be easily crossed with a horse and buggy. He spent the little remaining daylight looking upstream for a suitable ford, but to no avail. As darkness fell and he prepared to make camp by the river's edge he noticed, here and there in the shallow side pools and among the submerged crags and crevasses, an eerie blue white glow coming from beneath the flowing waters. He knew immediately what this was and what it signified. This was lumina, and its presence in the river was a sure indication that somewhere nearby, most probably upstream, another terramine, like the one he had found at the source of the Swift River, was actively engaged in the process by which a planet not naturally suited to habitability was made so by artificial means. In consequence of this find he named this watercourse the Light River and noted it in his journal before bunking down for the night.

-Day 3025

"Monday, May 25, 08: Morning. Everything is across the bridge, packed and ready to go, but I have decided to stay a while and take in the scenery."

He had already spent the early hours of the morning, when Lune was at its fullest and the river at its darkest, collecting as much lumina as he could comfortably carry. It was a useful enough commodity and the small amount he'd brought from the east had long ago faded off and the grey husks discarded. Then he'd used the dim hour before sunrise to carry the last of his luggage across the Light River to where Nightshade and her buggy were waiting from the previous afternoon, and reloading. He could easily have started out early, but had decided some days ago that he would spend a little more time enjoying a break in what was actually a very pleasant location. With its plentiful fresh water and food sources, as well as good timber for building, under different circumstances it may have made a suitable place to settle.

Of course he had already spent almost a week there, but that had been mostly hard work. The Light River narrowed considerably at that spot, but it flowed fast and deep and was no place for a horse and cart to cross. Even swimming across, which he had to do several times, was difficult. There were, however, by great good fortune, several beech trees growing close to the western bank that were strong and straight and easily tall enough to reach the other side if felled in the right direction. He did that, and then painstakingly, over the course of several days, split the trunk by the length using a combination of axe and sledge and whatever piece of stone or timber he could use as wedge and lever. Nightshade had been willing enough to be coaxed across. He fervently hoped similar such crossings between here and his destination would be few, while quietly acknowledging his luck at them having not already been more frequent.

Before starting out again he wanted to find the terramine he knew must be nearby. Finding it would not particularly aid his journey, at least no more than it already had by providing the lumina. Nor was it very surprising that he would have come across another one on so long a journey - typically, if they existed at all, they existed in large numbers across the surface of a planet and worked in combination to produce their intended result. But he wanted to see it for himself. He wanted that one more tangible connection with his past. It was a craving he had denied and suppressed as a matter of necessity as he made his way through a landscape rich with nature at its most primitive, or showing signs of alien machinations far removed from what he found comfortable. In particular he wanted to find something related to an intelligence he thought he understood, and a terramine might be enough to satisfy that.

He found the first direct sign of it barely an hour's trek upstream from the bridge, nestled behind a wall of rock in a crater that had clearly been gouged out of the surrounding mountains for the purpose. It was closer than he thought it would be. Ordinarily an active terramine that close to where he was camped would have given itself away as its massive pumps and pistons churned at the subterranean rocks and sucked at the air and water. Even if he'd not heard it he would surely have felt it. And this one was certainly still active. Water still swirled and bubbled through huge flat tanks, and faint whiffs of vapour rose into the air from numerous pipes and chimneys. But it was showing signs of slowing down. Had it been in full swing those whiffs of vapour would have been veritable tornadoes forcing concentrated gasses high into the sky, and the swirling water would have been a torrential flood across the entire base of the structure, and the pipes and chimneys would be glowing red with the effort of it all, and watching the process even as far away as he now was would be at least uncomfortable if not quite dangerous. As it was he did not want to get any closer, but this one seemed to be in the act of shutting down. Perhaps its job was done. Perhaps this planet no longer needed such monumental labour to keep it habitable. There was no way to tell how long it had taken to reach that point, anything from decades to millennia depending on what state the planet was in initially. Tens of millennia were not unheard of.

The last time he had been this close to a terramine was on Kruger, and seeing it now brought back memories of that time. They had existed on OldEarth as well, but there they were far too active to approach, working hard to tame a young and cantankerous world, stabilising its crust, rejuvenating its air, making it habitable for the amish communities and other forms of terrestrial life that had come to occupy it. On Kruger that work had been completed, taken over by the planet itself, and with the terramines lifeless and harmless he was able to walk right into them and study their workings in detail. He had climbed to the high rim of the cold chimney stack and peered into the maw where pure oxygen had once poured out in high concentrations and at high speed, mixing with the native atmosphere in substitution for centuries of activity of plants and algae. He had descended into its interior to see how the structure, like an iceberg revealing only the smallest fraction of itself above the surface, continued deep into the crust where it tamed the violent geological forces it found there while simultaneously drawing its energy from them. He had penetrated into the decades dead heart of the beast to where rock and water had once been pulverised and purified and recombined into minerals in which the life sent from distant Earth could grow and thrive. It had been so efficient at its task and so tightly honed in its execution that even the waste products were useful. He had lived among those ruins like a hermit, often for months on end, lighting his way with remaining lumina deposits and growing and cooking his meals in fuel residues in the perpetual night of that tidally locked world.

From what he could see at a distance, this still marginally active terramine appeared to be of essentially the same design. This meant one of two things - either there was only one design that performed the task with the required efficacy, objectively correct and universally applicable, or the same designers had been responsible for both. He had long speculated that the Hosts represented a hybrid of humanity's transhuman descendants and whoever had controlled this part of the universe originally - an exotic and unique form of being whose capacities and motivations he could scarcely begin to comprehend. That had to be the case, and indeed he had been told to expect as much. Told by those same transhuman powers themselves, the Overlords, in the Citadel of Orion, when he had been assigned the role of Ambassador.

It was a role he had been chosen for, specifically chosen from trillions of human souls occupying countless worlds, chosen through a process of vetting and selection that had lasted centuries before he was ever aware of it. That process had involved a great deal of luck, but it was anything but random. He had been chosen for his unique connection to the forgotten dawn of humankind. He alone, through a series of fortunate accidents, had survived since before the rise of the transhuman successors of his species - certainly the oldest and possibly the only human being who could make that claim. That is what gave him value as the representative of his race. To have been thus chosen was a great honour, the greatest of honours. He had been told that, given assurance from the highest of authorities that the task he had been assigned was of the utmost significance.

And sometimes, when he managed to flush the doubts from his mind for long enough, he had almost believed it.

It was in the Citadel of Orion that he had learnt of that role. He cast his mind back to the years he had spent there, at the Citadel, preparing for the part he was to play. The Citadel of Orion was a vast artefact - not merely a renovated planet but a construction the size of a planet, built by mining an entire world to destruction and reorganising the debris from that process. It was the mighty Overlords, creators and rulers of the Citadel who had assigned him to the role, told him what he should expect, had him trained in diplomacy and instructed in protocols. Instruction that had to be translated and filtered from their exalted origins - dumbed down for his benefit through several stages by his mentors and tutors - spokesmen for the interpretors to the divine will of the Overlords - humble servants who were themselves imposing personages known only by their titles - the Judge, or the Cardinal, or the Librarian.

Yet for all their teaching he had learned nothing. It was all an empty show. Even then he had known it.

"The 'Lords will be there to give guidance," the Librarian had told him once - comforting words at a time when the gravitas of what was being asked of him had begun to sink in.

"How can you know that?" he had asked in reply. "How can they know that?"

The question was a rhetorical one. He was well aware, even without having been taught, that for all their rarefied intellect, for all their deep analysis and arcane philosophy, for all the millennia of observation and study they had undertaken to reach that point, they knew essentially nothing about what they were asking him to do. He recalled how the Librarian, in a rare moment of genuine candour, had confirmed what they both understood.

"Knowledge only takes us so far, Ancient," he had said. "Even for the 'Lords knowledge only goes so far. To go further they, no less than you or I, need a little faith."

Now he was here, sitting by a terramine on a world renovated for him and his kind. He had taken that step of faith so long ago on behalf of his entire race, and had survived it. That told him something. It didn't tell him much, but it told him something. It told him that the message they intended to send - the message they eventually did send across the intergalactic void, the message that included himself as some small part of its content \- would be intercepted by beings with both the capacity and the desire to understand it.

And that was more than the Overlords of Orion had ever truly known.

-Day 3087

The Great Lake was now far behind and he was gradually working his way back towards the north, to his preferred path along the equator. He was in a region of desert, with long stretches of low sandy dunes followed by equally long stretches of hard baked clay or coarse red dirt, at times supporting sturdy brittlebush and prickly pear, but just as likely to show not the slightest sign of life for kilometres on end. In spite of the desolation food and water were available, if intermittent. The whole area was liberally peppered with oases which he would encounter every few days, just as he was starting to wonder if he'd seen the last of them. They were, he guessed, indicative of a system of aquifers lying not far beneath the surface, and were a welcome respite, offering a chance to refill his water skins and re-stock his food reserves with palm dates and occasionally more exotic fruits. Sometimes he would rest for a day or two, swimming in the cool water or just relaxing in the shade of a makeshift lean-to or a convenient cave beneath an outcropping of rocks before moving on. But the long periods between - the long days, and sometimes nights, in the saddle or in the cart or just trudging alongside, the seemingly endless expanse of sand and sky - were beginning to take their toll on his mind. Indeed the whole trip was starting to look like a fool's errand. He had long ago given up praying to whatever powers were responsible for him being there. They were not listening. They probably never had been. But he did wonder what their plan was, or if there was a plan.

That was not the real question. There had always been a plan - it is that which distinguished the activity of mind from the random activity of blind nature in the absence of intelligent control. As the universe came more and more to be dominated by mind so its primal form became less significant. He had lived through that transition, had been there at its start when the reach of mind did not extend beyond a single planet in orbit around a single star, had watched as it spread across the solar system of its birth, then to its stellar neighbourhood, then its home galaxy and now to a new galaxy to merge with a new mind undergoing the same process. The reality of that felt overwhelming, but in truth it had barely begun to take shape. And he was a barely significant part even of that. That is what he was. Whatever the plan was it belonged to an intellect far greater than his, and more than likely his own existence in this world, whether he lived or died, was not important to it. If he perished there in that desert not a single soul, human or otherwise, would mourn or miss him. The question was not whether there was a plan, but whether it was a good one. Far better, he thought, to have been like nearly every other human soul that had ever lived and be unaware of any of it.

It was on that afternoon, in the hour between midday and the day's darkening that the ebb of his emotions was especially low. There was no wind and no sound and not a living thing as far as his eye could see save for his horse and himself, and although the day was clear and bright the very absence of cloud only added to the doldrums of the land and the desolation of his soul. He stopped the cart and began to dig into the hard ground with mattock and shovel. He dug without thinking about it. On occasions before he had dug to find water if the signs of its presence were clear, but there were no signs here and he was not looking for water. At other times he might dig to build a mound of dirt marking his passage, to guide his path back, or just possibly that of someone following after him. But he was long past thinking either of those was likely. Or he would dig to line up his route and keep it straight, or to test the soil, or, when the land was especially flat and featureless, just to have something to look at. If he'd been asked why he was digging that afternoon he could not have given a reason. But there was no one to ask, so it didn't matter. As the sun hid itself and the landscape sank into inky blackness he fell to his knees before the mound of dirt he had dug out of the ground.

"Speak to me!" he cried out, the sound of his voice fading without so much as an echo in reply.

He lay on his back staring into the starless void. He had become accustomed to the absence of stars and rarely thought about it, but on that afternoon the emptiness of the sky mirrored that of his own soul. An idea came to him, unbidden and terrifying. Perhaps everything he was able to see, land and sun and the orb of Lune, was everything there was. Perhaps this was Omega. In the eschatology of his people, Omega was the name given to the ultimate fate of all things. Nobody had known for certain what it actually was, not even the erudite minds the descendants of his people had become, but it was widely believed that in a universe under intelligent control Omega would represent a state in which all conceivable perfections - all truths, all beauties, all joys, all moral virtues - had been attained and could be made to endure for something close to eternity. But perhaps that was all wrong. Perhaps his existence had spanned the time taken for every star save one to burn out and die, and he was on the only world left capable of supporting life - the final refuge for anything of interest to conscious thought, the last oasis doomed to die when he died, and possibly soon, leaving the universe empty forever.

Perhaps he had slept to the end of time itself.

All he could see was the face of Lune, a ghostly grey disk in the twice reflected light, and even that sickly pallor was draining away as the eclipse approached its peak. As it did so his own sense of purpose and value, the very significance of his existence seemed to drain from his soul along with it, as if that were nothing more than an illusion brought on by the soft light of day. But the lunar disk was not lacking its own light. Tiny flashes in several places towards the north produced a nearly continuous flicker indicating a system of fierce thunderstorms, and further to the south where the weather was calmer and clearer several sparse points like faint stars, and - there - something new, something he'd not seen before. A thread of crimson, curved around in an arc, closing itself into a loop. Very faint but unmistakable as his eyes adjusted to the dark. Another smaller one near to it. And another. Unquestionably real - not a figment of his own imagination or a product of his stimulus deprived senses. At the surface they must have covered a wide area, but from where he was they could easily be apprehended in a single glance.

He had not noticed anything like this red line of light on previous observations of the lunar disk, and its appearance at that moment felt especially auspicious. There was no reason at all to think it was there for his benefit. In fact there was very little reason to think it was not an entirely natural phenomenon, the product of an unknown but entirely explicable and simple mechanism operating on that world. But just maybe it was something more. In the moment he drew from it the thought that he was not alone and he was not unimportant. He was part of something bigger than himself, still mysterious, still unfolding, but real and significant nonetheless. As long as there was mystery in the world, as long as there were questions to be asked, he would have a role to play. He had been brought here for a purpose and he had a responsibility to see that purpose through.

As the light of day returned he felt his spirits lift and he continued with a fresh sense of hope.

-Day 3149

"Saturday, September 29, 08: Morning. I have wasted enough time here already. I need to make a move now come what may."

He wrote the entry sitting in a small cave formed in the gap between two large rocks at the end of a short canyon. Already three days had been spent at the base of the craggy outcrop, trying to find a way either through it or around it, to no avail. While he did consider making as long a detour as it took to find an easy pass, he had come to the conclusion that the best option was to go over it. Several times before he had needed to unhitch and unpack the buggy in order to more easily manhandle it over a rough patch, though this one was promising to be particularly troublesome. The cliff face that extended as far as he had been able to scout was not high, but it was sheer along the whole length. Now to top everything off the clouds had thickened overnight and some days of rain looked inevitable. He was hoping to be well past this place before it started.

He began by scaling the face of the cliff himself and arranging all the rope he had with a series of makeshift pulleys and belays, securely anchored around the trunk of some sturdy gum trees. Nightshade was to be pulled up first. He padded her up as best he could around her barrel, fore and hind, and harnessed her in with ropes distributing the weight as evenly as possible across her underside. She was not at all happy with the situation and protested vigorously and frequently, whinnying and struggling as the weight came off her feet when he began hauling. The process took the better part of an hour and consisted of ratcheting the pulleys up inch by inch and one at a time, first at the front, then at the back and then in the middle, then doing what he could to calm her either with soothing words from above or abseiling down to her level for a comforting pat. By the time she was safely at the top both horse and master were exhausted from the ordeal, but otherwise none the worse for it.

Next he hauled up his belongings, his supplies of food and water, tools, sacks of lumina, journals both blank and filled, tied together in convenient bundles and pulled to the top. He had barely started to pull up the buggy when the rain started - not a light shower but instantly torrential, and accompanied by strong winds and a fierce thunderstorm that came in fast and close and stayed there. To make matters worse the cart had become snagged by the wheel against some rocky protuberance halfway up, and the buffeting of the gale from that angle threatened to snap it at the axle. Nightshade's nerves, already frayed by the climb, were unravelling completely at the lightning flashes and the near simultaneous claps of thunder directly overhead. A panicked bolt in almost any direction here would not end well for the horse, so he left the cart dangling while he tied her off securely to the tree stump. In the meantime the cart had shifted again in the wind and was now caught even more firmly and at an even more awkward orientation. He slackened off the rope until he was supporting most of the weight with his own tired arms and a single loop around a branch of the tree now slippery with rain.

At that moment a small torrent of water struck him from the side. Startled, and fearing being washed over the cliff by a larger flood that might have been building further along the ridge, he let go the rope and sought a more secure footing. But that was enough to free the cart from its obstruction, and he watched in helpless despair as the rope slid from around the tree and waited the second or two for the inevitable crash that sounded like a faint mockery of the thunder. And now, as if this comedy of errors had one final joke to play, as he moved out cautiously to survey the damage below the sky faded from dull stormy grey to pitch black as the world slid into the shadow of the afternoon eclipse, punctuated only briefly by the lightning that still flashed from all sides. Unwilling to move around under this combination of conditions he sat huddled under a large rock to wait out the storm and the dark, not sure whether to cry or curse or just laugh.

By the time the eclipse was over the rain had eased considerably and the storm had moved on. He climbed down to the foot of the cliff and examined the damaged buggy. One wheel had snapped completely in half, its metal rim detached and twisted, and the axle had broken free of its mountings. It was not functional and, with the wherewithal at hand, not repairable. He would have to continue now on horseback only and with reduced supplies. Yet he felt oddly unconcerned by the development. It had been a hardy little vehicle that had served him much better and much longer than he'd had any right to expect. If he was honest, had he been asked at the start he would have gambled on being in this situation much sooner. He set the broken remains in a prominent position as a monument to its service, then shinnied back up the rope and proceeded to divide the rest of his possessions into those he would need and could carry in a saddlebag and those he could comfortably leave behind. He took food and water enough for himself and his horse to last a few days, a short length of rope, and a small supply of lumina. Of his tools and weapons he took the axe and Thunderbuss and what was on his belt. He also took two blank journals and the sextant he had made, this last as an afterthought mainly because of its light weight and small bulk. The rest he secured at the back of a rock overhang, sheltered but clearly marked for the time when he, or anyone else, might be passing this way again.

-Day 3228

"Monday, December 18, 08: Afternoon. Fog finally lifted. Sky clear."

Since the loss of the buggy and consequent reduction in luggage capacity he had taken to making very terse journal entries, often consisting of little more than the date. He had only brought two blank journals and wanted to use them sparingly for reports of particular note. The only reason he was making an entry here was because he had not made one earlier that day, and because the contrast in conditions from the morning, and indeed from the past several weeks, was especially striking. The sky over that time had been consistently overcast, and for the previous three days the whole land was shrouded in fog as dense as he had ever seen it, as if a thick black wad of thundercloud had descended to the ground right where he was travelling and stayed there. There was not the slightest breeze to drive it away, and while there was no rain the moisture within that fog over the extended time had dampened him and everything around him. For most of that time his whole sensory universe was reduced to a compact and silent bubble of grey or black, and there were times he could not see Nightshade trotting beside him as he led her by the reigns, even into the late morning.

The pace of his travel had slowed to a cautious dawdle, if he dared to move at all. Deprived of sensory input his mind was starting to fill the gaps with all manner of imagined dangers, in addition to the potentially real ones just out of sight. He could almost fancy having stumbled back past the creation of the world, to a time before reality had differentiated itself, to the primordial state from which all things would emerge. It was hard to know which was the greater fear - that beyond the range of his perception lay unseen dangers, or that there was nothing at all. It was possible to imagine that this was the true state of the cosmos and the reality of his place within it, and that all memories of a rich world filled with things to see and touch and do were just illusions, the conjurings of a mind existing alone. He recalled an old thought from the dawn of his race which held that all knowledge could be reduced to a single certain fact - that of one's own existence - and that all else must be taken on faith alone.

"Cogito ergo sum," he recited in the ancient tongue of that distant place and time, as if the sound of his voice was itself an act of creation in the emptiness. That philosophy had concluded in an echo of a much later thought, that a sort of moral necessity gave a basis for the faith, the intrinsic value of truth and the horror of deliberate deceit. Yet deceit was ever a possibility for any sentient being seeking truth, like a malevolent spectre just beyond the reach of rational thought.

"No creator creates with the intention of lying," the voice in his mind was his own, but from the past. A memory. "Yet all creation is a lie. All creation is the transformation of the primordial state into something other than what it is."

"That is not so." The reply, too, came from his memory, yet so clear and recent that he might have sworn he could pick Szohnjah's accent coming from the mist. "Creation is the fulfilment of a promise, the realisation of a truth that previously had only been hidden."

As if to validate those thoughts a light but steady westerly breeze had picked up around noon and the world slowly re-emerged from the fog, memories of his past retreating back into the recesses of his mind where they belonged. By the end of the afternoon eclipse air and sky had cleared so completely that no trace of cloud could be seen anywhere. His measured pace through the fog had not been necessary. The terrain ahead was free of any major obstruction along the track he was taking, a gently sloping descent spread with a patchy cover of spiky yellow grass. The lunar disk was now difficult to see in full without craning his neck, and careful observation of its visible surface features and the passage of the sun behind its disk were needed to realign himself to the correct path and keep him there. At that position in the sky it looked smaller than he remembered it looking when he had first seen it break free of the horizon, but measurements with his sextant showed it to be, if anything, slightly larger.

Directly in front of him, on what was otherwise a flat and featureless horizon, there was a single peak, small and hazy with distance. He might not have noticed it at all but for the dearth of anything else to see in that direction, and the idle hope that it would not grow, as it got nearer, into yet another range of mountains he would have to dodge or deal with. And when the last rays from the setting sun formed a neat red halo around it, he could not help but notice that, with singular precision, it was exactly dead ahead.

-Day 3254

It was becoming more and more difficult to tell, by observations of celestial motions and configurations alone, which was the best direction to travel. In fact the whole business of navigation had lately become bizarrely counter-intuitive - as if moving forward meant moving away from his destination - and he had to remind himself constantly that mathematical necessity always trumps gut instinct. His original rule of thumb, to follow the setting sun, would not serve any longer. Due west was not necessarily the direction he needed to go. The other rule, to follow the point on the horizon closest to the lunar disk, he knew to be more accurate. However far he might stray from a true equatorial path and whatever obstacles lay in the way, that point was always his ultimate goal. But Lune was now so close to its zenith, close enough for the afternoon eclipse to start before noon, that it was hard to tell with anything but vague generality which point that was.

But it seemed he now had a new target which, he was convinced, was exactly where he wanted to be.

What he had first noticed only incidentally as a small peak had grown over the intervening month or so into a very prominent landmark on the low horizon, and much too symmetric and regular to be a natural formation. For much of that time it had been hidden behind the large area of woodland he was traversing, or obscured by the misty haze of distance. But now he had emerged onto a broad plain and the horizon was clear once more, he could examine this new feature of the landscape. It rose out of the skyline in stark contrast to the rough, low hills around it, crisp straight sides converging to a clean angle at its apex, like the head of an arrow pointing directly to the sky. Though it had become much bigger and clearer over that time, he had not approached it anything like as rapidly as he would have expected when he first saw it. Had it been a normal mountain peak it should have been well behind him by now. The alternative explanation meant that it must be very large and still considerably distant. He was all too conscious of the mistake he had made when he saw the domed arc of Lune for the first time - indeed there was still a chance this was another satellite in geostationary orbit rather than a feature of the ground, though in that case it was certainly an oddly shaped satellite. Be that as it may, he would treat it like a target and head in that direction.

"Let us build a tower whose top may reach into heaven." (Gen 11:4)

-Day 3280

"Thursday, February 10, 09: Afternoon. I have arrived!"

The traveller could scarcely contain the sense of achievement and elation at having reached this place, made all the more palpable when he finally admitted the doubts that had played in the back of his mind from the beginning. He had not really expected to make it this far, and even if he did he had not really expected to find anything. Not only was he here, it was clearly a place with importance not confined to his own imagination \- there was something here, something real and tangible, something he was meant to find and expected to investigate. Yet this euphoria, it seemed, was to be dampened one more time. There was another obstacle in the way, and this one looked to be the hardest yet.

For the last several days of his approach the upper portions of the structure that loomed ahead presented much the same appearance, changing only gradually in the amount of detail he could see through the haze of distance and the angle of its peak. That final leg of the trek had been an easy and a pretty one, across gently rolling hills and grassy plains, through meadows blooming with wildflowers and across narrow stony brooks. Deer and horses, alone or in pairs or small herds, grazed peacefully along the slopes. Those last days were clear and sunny, cooled by a light breeze. Each of those days, including this one, had been interrupted as usual by the daily darkening of the sky that lasted from half an hour before noon until half an hour after. And today, half an hour after that, he reached this, the penultimate point of his journey.

He was standing at the edge of a high cliff overlooking an expanse of water that stretched in front of him almost to where the horizon should have been. Yet there was no horizon here. In its place was a white wall that rose out of the sea and extended far to the left and right, curving away from him into the distance to the limit of his vision. Behind the wall along the whole length that he could see, and seeming to extrude from its top at about his own level, a series of vertical columns of a bewildering variety of forms and styles, like skyscrapers in a vast city. Behind those were more skyscrapers, taller than the ones in front, and behind those taller ones again - and so on, extending back and up before him, an enormous inverted cone of buildings that culminated in a single peak he had to crane his neck to see. Fluffy cumulus clouds seemed to abut the edges of the structure, even at its relatively low tiers, as they drifted in and out of its shadow in the afternoon sun. He estimated it must have been in the order of tens of kilometres high. And it pointed, if the line of sight was continued upwards, directly at the familiar face of Lune, suspended in the sky overhead.

The afternoon was still young when the sun, as it had done for the past several days, descended behind the tallest peak and cast a long dark shadow across the whole land behind him. It glinted here and there at first as it bounced around what must have been internal surfaces of crystal or chrome, before finally becoming blocked entirely. He spent the remainder of the afternoon roaming along the cliff top to get a better perspective on the surreal cityscape before him, trying to detect any sign of life or activity, anything to suggest the place was occupied. There was nothing. As nightfall approached he gathered wood enough for a substantial camp fire, in part with the hope that its light would draw attention to his presence and prompt a response. But before long the shadow of the City merged fully with the onset of night leaving nothing to see save the flicking orange glow of the fire and the half face of Lune above.

-Day 3281

It was well before dawn - with light enough from an almost full Lune to cast the City in immense ghostly relief, and more than enough to move about - that he set out on an exploration of the coastline, heading north. He had not slept much anyway, keen to observe the City through every phase of the daily cycle. Those observations had not taught him much with any certainty - only that if the City was inhabited it did not have much of a night-life. At no time had he seen even the slightest hint of unreflected light coming from any part of it, not even at midnight when the full face of Lune was dimmed by the midnight eclipse and his eyes had become acclimatised to total dark.

As the sun was rising he sat on a high headland eating a breakfast of figs and blackberries he had found nearby, and watching as the City slowly illuminated from the top down, starting at its upper peak when the sky behind him was barely showing the crimson hue of dawn. Something caught his eye in the water some distance off shore - a movement that did not quite match the rippled surface, a small jet shooting vertically into the air, then another, then more movement, a slow roiling in several places but confined to a small region within his line of sight. That suggested an answer, albeit inconclusive, to a question that he'd posed immediately on arrival the previous day. There was a chance this body of water, like the Great Lake encountered nine months earlier, was just an inland sea. That was part of what this current exploration was aimed at finding out. Perhaps the City sat in the middle of a lake, this waterway surrounding it as might a moat surround a medieval castle, scaled proportionally.

But it felt unlikely anyone would put whales in a moat, however large.

The headland sloped gradually down to a short section of sandy beach where small waves lapped gently against the shore. He waded in to his knees and tasted the water. Salt. It tasted like ocean - still more evidence he had indeed reached the western side of the Great Continent, the City located on an island just off shore and beyond that an open sea. In any case it didn't matter. This was, he felt certain, where he was meant to be.

With little wind and no tides to whip them up the waves lapping the shore were small and gentle. He realised - as he had before, though here the fact seemed particularly apropos - how lucky it was that Lune and NewEarth were locked so precisely together. Of course he still suspected that luck might have nothing to do with it. But whatever the reason, had it not been the case, these coastal regions would have been subject to periodic tides many kilometres high, making them difficult to even approach, much less inhabit. They would likely have affected the land as well, producing earthquakes and volcanoes and other geological activity, reducing habitability further still. As it was he must, even now, be standing atop a tidal distension of crust and sea level of significant height compared to what it would be otherwise. Yet it was pleasantly serene here, even peaceful.

-Day 3288

His explorations had taken him far to the north and south - far enough that the visage of the City began to recede in both directions, and its distance off shore visibly increase - and still no sign of a bridge or any other easy means of crossing. Yet there was no doubt that crossing was what he had to do. It being too far to swim he began to make plans for the construction of a boat. He was aware, even as a plan was forming in his mind, that the attempt would be futile if there was no way into the City once the crossing was achieved, and from the distance it was difficult to tell what access was available. The City seemed to be surrounded by a high wall that, for the most part, rose directly out of the sea. But here and there along its length were what appeared to be cave-like openings or wharf-like platforms that might represent a way through. That was a chance he would have to take.

-Day 3295

It took the better part of a week of concentrated effort to construct even the simplest of dugout canoes \- finding and felling the ideal tree, trimming and shaping and carefully carving out its innards to form the hull, then dragging it down to the beach. The only serious tools he had for the job were his axe and IceNeedle, a fire he lit to scorch the wood and make it easier to work, and Nightshade who was indispensable in transporting the finished vessel from forest to beach. A long, strong stick of birchwood, suitably whittled down, made a sturdy oar. The result was satisfactory given that it was a first even for him, and he'd had to guess the design. Finally he spent a few hours testing it for seaworthiness in the shallows along the shoreline, convincing himself it was stable enough without the need for an outrigger or additional ballast.

He made up his mind that, provided conditions remained calm and clear as they had been these last days, he would set out at first light the following morning. He laid out a few essential provisions, mindful of the limited capacity of the small canoe - food and water for a day or two, a small length of rope for mooring and climbing, some lumina for the dark places and times, Thunderbuss for the unknown dangers he might find and a single journal to record it all. He told himself that this was nothing more than an exploratory mission - that he would be back this way again soon - yet he also knew there was a chance, a good chance in fact, that either by choice or force, if not now then later, something in that vast expanse of artificial structures would compel him to stay there. With that thought in mind there was one more solemn and sobering duty he needed to perform before setting out.

He removed Nightshade's saddle and saddlebag and placed with them the most complete of his two remaining journals, the axe and those other bits and pieces to be left behind. He put them in a crevice in the rocky headland at the end of the beach where the dugout lay ready to be launched, and surrounded the spot with a construction of rocks and sticks dug firmly into the sand, both to mark it and protect it. Then he mounted Nightshade and rode her bareback out to a wide grassy field at the foot of a gently sloping hill where he had seen a group of wild horses grazing several days earlier. He dismounted, rubbed her mane and held her head briefly in his hands. At nine years old she was still young enough to adjust to a new life with a new herd.

"Go on girl," he said, not even attempting to wipe the single tear he felt run down his cheek. "You've been a good friend. You'll be just fine," he added more to reassure himself than her. He gave her a single pat on the rump and walked off.

He allowed himself one last look back only to make sure she wasn't following him, smiling and shaking his head at the stark contrast of emotions he felt to see that she wasn't. Then he walked alone towards the coast, the shadow of the City behind the afternoon sun dulling everything around.

-Day 3296

"Saturday, February 26, 09: Morning. The final leg starts now."

With the first rays of the morning sun at his back the boatman set off. Sitting as low as he was in the water his destination was technically over the horizon, but he estimated it would take about two hours to reach it provided the breeze stayed calm and the current weak. It was for the most part an easy paddle, even relaxing. Recreation on, or in, or around the water was something he had enjoyed for most of his life. On nearly every world that had served as home there were bodies of water large enough to be utilised. Earth, of course, was mostly water. Much of his childhood had been spent fishing or swimming or canoeing on the dams and lakes around his home or on seaside holidays with his parents, but he could only remember that now in the vaguest of images that seemed to belong to someone else. On OldEarth he had also spent time fishing from a dinghy along the shores of the Great Lake near his home in Southhaven, as had most of his neighbours there. On Kruger there were only small, isolated bodies of murky, muddy, lifeless water, but even these could be enjoyed in a small boat if that was the mood. There, where the sun never moved in the sky, one could loose hours at a time without realising it. Even Aurigae, not so much a world as a vast flotilla of artificial habitats orbiting a star, had been made homely with water features, some of which were veritable oceans. His own private dwelling there boasted a lake that curved up and overhead around the cylindrical surface, and exposed the stars themselves through windows in the depths. The recollection of those times provided a comforting diversion as he plied his way further from the shore.

Something knocked against the underside of the boat - not hard, but enough to draw him quickly back into an awareness of the present. He looked into the water on each side, thinking he may have come onto a sandbar. The water was very clear and very deep, but what he did see was of greater concern than deep water. Shadows, big shadows moving beneath his small canoe, sliding around in the depths. Shadows of a shape familiar from his distant childhood and from subsequent recollections, a reminder of the primitive terror of the sea. Sharks. White sharks. Not only one, but several - many - swimming to and fro around him - a veritable school of large sharks. The place seemed to be infested with them. Another knock. They were not being aggressive, just curious - but a curious shark, he knew, was not much less worrying than an angry one. A dorsal fin breached ominously beside the boat's starboard. He brought Thunderbuss to the ready, but doubted it would be much use if things became serious. The best plan, he thought, would be to act more like a log of wood than live bait, so he remained still in the hope they would lose interest. Within a tense half an hour they showed signs of doing just that, thinning and dispersing to the point that he dared to continue paddling slowly, keeping a careful eye out for their return.

Not long after that, and with a good ten minutes hard paddling still to go before his destination, a new crisis presented itself. He became aware that the seat of his pants was damp. He was sitting in a substantial and increasing pool of seawater. Whether through a flaw in the design or the execution or just the material of his vessel, he was taking on water. The goal was in sight now, a clear break in the sheer outer wall of the City that would serve as a platform of dry land to stand on. There were several of them along the waterline, and he aimed at the nearest, intermittently paddling and bailing water with his hands, reaching it with, he guessed, minutes before foundering entirely. The platform was situated some height above the level of the water, low enough to climb if he stood in the canoe, but impossible to reach from treading water, and with no handholds or moorings on the smooth white vertical face of the wall. It would be a delicate balancing act and he knew he only had one shot. He hurled his belongings one by one over the lip, then, in a single motion, quickly but carefully leapt from the canoe and clambered to safety. The action was enough to push the canoe away and also roll it so that water washed in over the side, destabilising it further. Re-boarding was now out of the question.

"So much for getting back to shore," he muttered to himself as he watched it drift away, bobbing like a partly submerged log. "Looks like I'm committed."

He was standing on the flat floor of a large cave, its roof and walls forming a single surface, like a spherical wedge carved in to the main bulk of the wall. The whole structure was of white stone, like marble or maybe just rendered to look that way. It was featureless and empty apart from a small circular opening in the back wall which, the man hoped, would lead into the City. He gathered himself and his belongings and sat for a moment, contemplating the distant cliffs and beach and the background of hills looking bright and green in the mid morning sun. Then he went to the back of the cave to investigate what was now the only way out.

The opening was wide enough to crawl through or shuffle with a low stoop, though not stand up in, and did appear to form a tunnel extending back into the structure. But it was dark in there - disconcertingly dark. He took a chunk of lumina from his duffel bag and scraped off a fresh surface with IceNeedle. The freshly exposed surface emitted a blue-white light with the intensity of a candle flame, enough to illuminate a localised section of tunnel as he peered in from the entrance. The walls were white and featureless, a continuation of the material forming the rest of the surroundings, except for a single small protuberance on one side which had the appearance of a button that wanted pressing. He did press it and watched with considerable delight as the entire tunnel lit up with a soft white light emitted from sections of translucent faux wall along its length. He could see that it extended a considerable distance before branching off at the end, and that there were several other branch points to the left and right before that.

"Another damn maze," he grumbled as he crawled in as far as the first junction that turned left, and saw that it continued in a similar fashion in that direction. They were often used by authorities of one sort or another who wanted, not to block access to some special place but rather restrict it to those who, for whatever reason, deserved it. He had seen mazes used like that frequently in the past to protect the sacred and the sacrosanct, to generate confusion where outright deception was forbidden. The Library ante chamber on the Orion Citadel was a vast hall of mirrors so complex that he needed to be guided through every time he visited it. On OldEarth a maze of totems had successfully warded off unwanted visitors from the monument to worldfall for thousands of years. Even the Jimitry and the Nest he had encountered during his travels on this world may have had that function. Now that he was entering a region of his world dominated by the artificial over the apparently natural he might expect such features again.

He made a plan in the first instance to always go left where there was a choice, marking the wall to indicate the return path should he need to backtrack. But the material had the solidity of granite and was difficult to scratch even with the tip of IceNeedle, though he did manage to leave some faint traces of lumina at what he thought were the crucial junctions. He also looked carefully for some clue to the correct direction that might have been left by the builders, but found nothing.

As the minutes rolled into hours, and the seemingly endless tunnels and interminable branching and turning showed no sign of leading to a destination, the tightness of the space started to play on his natural fear of confinement. It occurred to him that the artificial lighting in this place could be on a timer, or might be relying on a limited energy supply, and the prospect of the lights going out this far in filled him with dread. The small amount of lumina he had with him would not be enough to dispel the dark from his mind should that happen. The fact that they had been on for over two hours did not make the slightest difference to the thought, once formed, that they could extinguish at any moment. Already his plan to turn left at each junction had led to several dead ends that needed reversal and reassessment, and his own system of marking was starting to confuse him just as much as the maze itself. More and more desperately he wanted to be free of the place.

That wish was satisfied suddenly when he emerged into a pitch black and very spacious expanse, the strange contrast between brightly lit confinement and dark freedom hitting him like the punchline to a bad joke. It took a moment to realise that he had most likely returned to the starting point and, it having been no more than a few hours, had emerged in the middle of the noon eclipse. It was a few minutes later as his eyes adjusted and the distant shore was slowly illuminated by the sun returning from the shadows that this thought was confirmed. Several minutes later the cavern around him and the seascape it looked out on were clear once more in the light of the early afternoon.

But now more confusion. Something was still wrong. The rest of his belongings, his duffel bag and ropes and weapon and supplies of food and water, the few items he had left that he had seen fit to bring with him in the canoe, were nowhere to be seen. First thought, he had been robbed - which implied he was not alone here, a prospect that might bode good or ill. But no \- there was a better explanation. This was not the same cavern. A couple of simple observations verified this second hypothesis, the small beach from which he had launched the dugout that morning - so very long ago it seemed - he could see in the distance now further to the north than it should have been. He was also higher up above sea level as he could easily tell when he carefully glanced over the edge to a drop of several metres. Indeed much of the crawling around in the maze, he now recalled, did seem to be sloping upwards. Apart from those considerations, however, this hollow did appear identical to the one he had arrived on and only had the same two exits, neither of which appealed.

He waited a while in the open air steeling himself, but he knew there was no option but to continue trying to navigate a way through the maze. As if to add extra time to the lights he pressed the button at the tunnel entrance on the way back in. A row of darkness rapidly spread from where he was, the last glimmer of light disappearing around the furthest junction in less than a second. Alarmed, he quickly pressed the button again and was relieved to see the lights come back on just as quickly and in the same sequence, confirming the button as a simple toggle switch. He had not seen any other buttons, or any other variation in the texture of the tunnel walls internally, and surmised they must only be located at entry or exit points. As he crawled back through the entrance he made a resolution to leave the buttons alone, and to trust that these lights were designed to stay on indefinitely in that case. The goal now, at least in the first instance, was to backtrack to his point of origin, there to gather what meagre supplies he had and would probably need, and also to reassess his strategy from a fixed home base. In his mind he was drawn back to times he had lived for decades in claustrophobic conditions, parts of which had been every bit as tight and confining as where he was now. Those memories were very old and he was sure that life and those times were the source of his persistent dislike of confinement, yet somehow he felt that trying to remember them, knowing that he had survived there for so long, would be a comfort and strength now.

There was one place in particular, the planet Kruger. Kruger-Sixty AA. It was the first planet he had lived on after his homeworld, Earth. It had been at the start a dismal little planet, completely unfit for human habitation. That was always the way. No planet had ever been found that was, in its natural state, a match for Earth. All required work, some more than others, and very few that were even worth considering. Kruger-Sixty AA was one of the first ever found in that category, but when he had come to live there at first that work had only begun, and the only safe place to live was underground, in artificial environments that were easy to control and maintain. It was like a prison, cramped and squalid, a network of low, narrow passages connecting living quarters and utility rooms. Yet he had lived there for over a century.

There had been a man there. There had been a lot of people living there in Kruger's subsurface. It seemed it had been a popular thing to do back then. But the memory of one man kept intruding on his thoughts, and he wasn't sure why. He could not even remember the man's name.

He became aware that he was reaching branch points that had not previously been marked. Backtracking, he managed to pick up the previous trail but was still unable to find his way back to the initial entry point, let alone any clue to the real way out. Eventually, after several more hours crawling around on hands and knees, his back aching from stooping, he made it back to the secondary base cave, easily identified this time by the clear smudges of lumina he had left at the entrance for just that reason. It was well into the night by then and he collapsed, exhausted in both body and spirit, onto the hard floor where he remained until morning.

-Day 3297

Although not the slightest bit refreshed from the restless and uncomfortable few hours attempting to sleep, he forced himself back into the maze as the first rays of morning sun began to appear above the distant shore, pausing only briefly to take a few deep breaths and clear his mind of fear and doubt. He was determined to penetrate deeper than he had the previous day, but to do it systematically and paying close attention to his own marking of the walls. The small knob of lumina he had was getting smaller and he would need to use it both sparingly and efficiently.

More and more this place was reminding him of Kruger. He wasn't even sure why. The tunnels there were not a maze, at least not intentionally, but rather simple conduits connecting different sections of a sprawling underground settlement. They had been wider, too. A short person could walk through them upright, ducking only occasionally for a narrow doorway. But they did look similar - same featureless white walls with rounded cross section, same dim but adequate lighting. Same feeling of claustrophobia building up the longer he spent in them, as if they could shrink at any moment trapping or crushing anyone unfortunate enough to be in them at the time. He had not been alone there as he was here. That was a world shared with comrades and peers. Even its Governors, those who controlled its resources and managed its constructions had been accessible to anyone who wished to seek them out. He could recall none of them now, could not hear their voices or see their faces, except ...

There was one man he remembered. Bartholemew - that was the man's name. He had not thought of Bartholemew in centuries. Bartholemew was a kind of strange old hermit who inhabited the hidden spaces among the deep tunnels of Kruger. Perhaps driven mad by a life history no one had bothered to learn, or perhaps just eccentric, marching to a rhythm only he could hear. He was harmless enough, the kind of person one would avoid engaging in conversation, either as a point of mutual choice or because he would never be found in the places most other folk would prefer to be. If conversation could not be avoided, however, it often consisted of many minutes of mostly polite but also mostly incomprehensible rambling.

"Why don't you come out of the shadows, Bartholemew?" one might ask, "Come, join the rest of us to celebrate life together."

"Nay, Laddie," Bartholemew would reply. "Throngs vex the spirit ... Crowds confuse the mind ... bright lights blind the eyes ..."

Bartholemew had disappeared at some point. It slowly occurred to people that no one had seen him for a long time, but no one paid much mind to that. His remains were discovered months, or was it years, later in the deepest of the deep parts of the Kruger underground where he had become lost or trapped and perished in the dark. Or maybe he had simply chosen to wait there for death to take him. Nobody knew. And there the matter ended, another life like so many others, forgotten to history.

Almost forgotten.

The man emerged once more into daylight, his head - his whole body - aching with fatigue. He had been wandering through the maze for the entire morning and much of the afternoon with no tangible progress. It was now approaching evening, the whole ocean in front of him and what he could see of the shore dull with the shadow of the immense City that was so close but still so inaccessible. He actually longed to be back on that shore. What had started as a minor nuisance, just another challenge to be overcome, was rapidly becoming a serious issue of life and death. There were too many pathways in the maze. Unless he was extremely lucky a systematic and exhaustive search would take days at least, and a random search would potentially be even worse. But he didn't have days. He might be able to last that long without food, but he had no water either, and was already feeling the early symptoms of dehydration.

He sat with his feet over the lip of the cave watching seascape descend further into shadow trying to suppress a growing sense of panic and despair, knowing that these would reduce the prospect of a reasoned solution. There had to be some sort of clue somewhere, but he had seen nothing that looked like even a vague hint. It made no sense. If it had been intended as a test then he was failing. If it was designed to keep him out, why have it at all? Why not just a solid barrier? If there was no way into the City the only other way out was to try to make it back to shore, but he was not prepared for a swim of that distance and, as he had found out, the water here was teeming with sharks. He did briefly consider jumping back into the water and searching along the waterline for a more rational entrance point - perhaps there was a back door, or even a proper front door, that he had missed on the way out - but he knew there would be no returning from that choice if it proved to be the wrong one. He even considered throwing himself on the mercy of whoever was in charge here, but the memory of how that turned out last time still haunted him and he had always made a point of assuming that would be futile. If it ever came time to take that option, it would only be when it wasn't an option at all.

He continued to sit and watch as the last trace of blue faded from the eastern sky leaving it jet black and starless as usual. He watched the moonlight dancing on the rippled water like a million fireflies. He watched as the pallid outline of the far off shore and the patchy clouds drifting like ghosts across the sky increased in brightness with the waxing of the lunar disk. He watched as the gibbous bulge began to show itself from behind the wall above his head. The whole scene actually looked strangely beautiful from this vantage point. It had been a long time since he'd felt the need to pray, but with nothing left to lose he thought to try one more benediction.

"If anybody is still watching," he yelled into the night, "if anyone is there, now would be the time."

-Day 3298

It was close to midnight and the last trace of light from the world beyond the wall had vanished as the nightly lunar eclipse approached its maximum. The only light was from the tunnel which illuminated a small patch of the cave in its immediate vicinity, like a single portal to an unknown reality punched into an otherwise endless black void. It was there in that tiny sliver of light, between two different versions of oblivion that the man sat huddled, the only place offering some modicum of comfort. He was dozing, slipping in and out between barely conscious and barely unconscious. For some reason that he didn't have the strength of mind to understand or the strength of will to refuse he kept seeing the face of Bartholemew, and hearing his voice - the face and voice of a man whose name, until only a few hours earlier, he could not even remember - a man who had not entered his thoughts for over five hundred years before that. A man who had died over ten million years ago.

"The glare of day brings pain," the voice in his mind kept saying, "it is a thing to be avoided."

Fat lot of good that advice did you, the man thought, you old fool.

"Brightness distracts the mind," the voice went on as consciousness started to fade away once more, "it is the enemy of clear thought. Colours dazzle the senses."

"Light can blind...

Sometimes the way forward ... is best seen ...

... in the dark."

He sat bold upright.

"That's crazy," he heard himself say out loud, shaking his head as if to dispel a thought that terrified him, even as it gave a small glimmer of hope.

"The question is," he added, turning his attention to the bright tunnel entrance, "is it crazy enough?"

He pressed the button. Within seconds all trace of light vanished from the world leaving a darkness so thick it was almost tangible. He resisted the temptation to remove the small piece of lumina from his tool belt, letting his eyes adjust to the dark. There. There was something. Faint, pale blue smudges on the wall. No. They were just his own lumina markings, slowly giving up the last of their stored energy. He felt his way in past the entrance and deeper into the tunnel, heart pounding in his chest. More lumina smudges as he passed the first junction. There. Something different. A red dot surrounded by blackness. In the distance. Red - not pale blue - not lumina. He blinked twice - three times - to be sure it didn't exist only in his imagination, or as an overgrown phosphene in the back of his eye. It was still there. He crawled closer watching it shift and change as he moved, resolving itself into a short segment of red line that bent around a corner in the tunnel, right in front of his face. As clear an indication of the direction he should go as he could have hoped for. He touched the mark, still trying to determine if it was real, if it had any substance, if it was perhaps just painted on. It had no texture other than that of the wall around it, and didn't smudge, but it did disappear under his fingers and reappear when he took them away. In that sense at least it seemed to be a real part of the real wall. He followed its direction around the corner. Another spot of red, ahead in the distance. The game was on.

He followed the red marks for what seemed like hours, sometimes left, sometimes right, sometimes vertical ones pointing up into vertical shafts that needed to be climbed, always there was another mark to guide him further. Occasionally he took out the lumina torch from his belt to better gauge the immediate surrounds. The red marks faded quickly even under that meagre light, but returned as quickly when he put it away. The darkness felt like it was penetrating him, as if he was drowning in it. And the silence as well, and the stillness - felt substantial enough to crush him. Even the passage of time itself was becoming lost to him. How long had he been in there? Hours? Days? Perhaps he had always been there. It felt like all his senses had been turned off save for touch - and the perception of red lines.

Then something new invaded this tiny world - a different kind of light up ahead. He abandoned the search for red lines and made his way with all haste to that light.

He emerged into a pool of glare and allowed himself several minutes of blinking as his eyes readjusted, and stretching his aching back before attempting to stand up and take in his surroundings. He was standing under the open sky in what looked like a small park - a broad area of grass with a sprawling fig tree in the middle surrounded by a variety of flowering plants and a walled circular pond next to that. The lawn and garden were patchy and unkempt but not overgrown, as if they were tended intermittently by a less than fastidious grounds-keeper. Beyond the park he could see blocky structures that might at first glance have been taken for houses or cottages in a little village. Beyond that he could see the City, its strange variety of tall skyscrapers rising skyward just as he had seen from the shore, but now much closer and with no obvious barriers at that point separating him from them.

He had made it into the City.

The sun was high overhead in the clear blue sky next to the slightly darker disk of Lune directly above, and it took a moment of re-orienting himself to see that the noon eclipse had already passed and it was now early afternoon. The odd distortions of time also straightened themselves out in his mind bit by bit. It had taken the better part of twelve hours to traverse the maze. Behind him was a high white wall into which was set the crawl space from which he had just emerged. An arrangement of steps and inclines led to the top of the rampart above his head. The water in the pond didn't look particularly clean, but he threw a couple of handfuls over his face and risked drinking a couple more to slake his thirst and tide him over until something better could be found. In any event, it tasted fine.

"Is anybody there?" he called out as he made his way towards the village. "Anybody at all?" He wasn't expecting an answer and would have been extremely surprised to receive one, but to be suddenly in what was clearly an artificial landscape after so many years in what, by comparison, was pristine wilderness fairly demanded the question be asked. Certainly the place looked deserted, though not entirely lifeless. Bees were buzzing among flowers in the garden, and there were birds, magpies and cockatoos, flying overhead or perched in the fig tree, squawking and eyeing him suspiciously as he walked past. They gave the place a slightly less sinister atmosphere than it might otherwise have had.

He walked over to the nearest of the cottages. Like all the buildings around it was sitting on a flat ground of the same white material as the wall surrounding the City, comfortably isolated from its neighbours. It was of very simple design, little more than a rough cube with a slightly sloping roof, windows all around and a single hinged door on one side with no lock or handle. The door swung open easily when he pushed it. The interior was a single room, empty save for what looked like a wooden crate, which was itself empty. He left that cottage and made for another one nearby that was of similarly simple form but larger, large enough to have a second storey, and surrounded by a small cobbled yard and a low fence with a welcoming open gateway and path leading to the door. As he approached he heard the faint sound of running water coming from somewhere inside. He entered and found the ground level divided into two simple rooms by a single partition, one of which had a table of sorts but no chairs, and the other what appeared to be a wooden bookshelf, with no books. There was also a flight of stairs leading to an upper level where he found another two rooms. In one a shower rose hanging down from the ceiling dribble water in several continuous streams onto the floor, where it flowed away through a series of grated drain holes. There were no taps. One of the walls was polished chrome making a crude but effective full length mirror. In the other room a raised square platform occupied most of its centre, the upper surface soft like a mattress but with no sheets.

The peculiarity of the situation was not lost on him, but at that moment he was willing to take anything on offer. It had been a long couple of days, and that bed looked to be the most comfortable thing he had slept on for years. He tasted the water coming from the shower. It was cool and fresh and he sipped on it slowly until his thirst was quenched. On an impulse, he stripped and stood under the nozzle for many minutes allowing the water to flow through his hair and across his back. The mirrored wall provided the truest glimpse of his own reflection he'd seen in all his years on this world, and the image shocked him - grizzled and dishevelled, long hair and beard, a mass of scar tissue from head to foot. It was a very different perspective, seeing himself now as another would have seen him. Even without the scars he looked older than what his biological age would have suggested - probably closer to true years, he thought with a laugh. Is this how humanity is poised to represent itself to the universe, he asked himself sombrely, is this what we have become? He pulled IceNeedle from his belt, its edge still as keen as a razor after all that time, and tried to shave, giving up only after he'd botched the job completely. At least he didn't draw blood.

Then he lay on the bed and, even with daylight streaming through the windows, went quickly to sleep.

-Day 3299

Light was still streaming through the window when he woke up, but now it was from the direction of morning. He felt refreshed from the night's sleep, more so than he could remember feeling for a long time, even exhilarated in anticipation of exploring the City. He could not resist the speculation that this, at last, was what he had lived so long and travelled so far to do - to study something build by an intelligence other than that of humanity or its progeny. An artefact of truly alien design. At the same time the prospect felt overwhelming.

He began his exploration by inspecting several more of the strange houses making up this little township. As he moved further from his point of entry they became larger and more elaborate, each with its own set of recognisably useful features but none ever amounting to a fully functional dwelling. In one there were several chairs lining one wall, in another a bathtub was perpetually filling with water that drained away from an overflow outlet at just the right rate to keep it at a fixed level. One even had a serviceable toilet that seemed connected to what he could only hope was an operational sewage system - a discovery of which he made special note for future use, even though, alas, there was no toilet paper.

These structures were playing on his perception and imagination, indeed the whole village had a very particular feel to it. It was not like a ghost town - not a place where people had once lived and had now abandoned. Rather it was more like a model, like a collection of doll's houses that had been scaled up, admitting no more than the merest nod to the niceties and practicalities of human occupation. Yet oddly he felt as if this made perfect sense. This was a town intended for human use, designed by an architect with no more than the most elementary knowledge of human needs or culture. Yet they were not completely clueless. They knew enough to get the basics right. It was as if they were deliberately limiting their involvement, as they had been doing all along. Was this another test, he wondered, to see how he would respond? Was he being scrutinised right now? Or were they just playing with him, as if he was the doll in this outsized toy village?

As he walked deeper into the City it seemed that with each step taken the height of the buildings around him increased by a step. Gradually the simple box houses became squat unit blocks, then taller apartment blocks and small office towers. Parts of it looked like any large city that he remembered from Earth - London or Perth or New York - skyscrapers of concrete and glass and steel. Further in it was more reminiscent of the habitats he had known from Aurigae or the Citadel of Orion - huge gleaming structures of crystal and chrome that became lost in their own perspective as they soared skyward. Juxtaposed with this was something equally familiar - if not more so - but from an entirely different context. Running around or between or vertically alongside many of the structures, sometimes close to the ground, sometimes high above his head, transparent plastic tubes identical to those he had seen at the Jimitry or the Nest, though absent the wasps of the latter.

The age of the place was difficult to determine. On one hand the buildings appeared untarnished by time, with no rust or patina even on those surfaces that looked to be iron or copper. On the other hand it did look dirty, as though natural cycles of wind and rain - blowing in dust from the desert and partially washing it out - were the only form of attention it had ever received. It might, for all he could tell, have been sitting here for anything from a few years to a few millennia. There were some weedy plants growing haphazardly from dirt accumulated around the corners of some of the buildings, but nothing that immediately struck him as edible, an observation prompted by his increasing awareness of his own hunger and the fact he had not eaten in days.

As the structures became more imposing and less residential in their appearance they also became less accessible. Many of the doors were either locked or jammed shut or else not functional doors at all, and on some of the structures there was nothing that even resembled a door. He began to wonder if much of the City was only for show, a collection of artistic works in a gallery, or perhaps just a single huge sculpture. Those that could be entered were mostly hollow and empty. Some had stairs leading to balconies or rooftops that afforded a good view of the surrounding region from above, including as far as the ocean and the shoreline to the east. In one case access to the upper floors was by way of a mechanical elevator that operated continuously and required careful timing to jump on and off at the desired place, in the manner of a chairlift.

One building stood out as an unusual design even by the standards of the City. It was squat in comparison to the buildings nearby, only a few storeys tall, but surrounded by a collection of unadorned white cylinders, like tanks, connected to it by a network of narrow pipes. What made it especially intriguing was that the door, though locked initially, was controlled by a mechanism of sliders and latches - a puzzle, albeit a simple one, that invited solution followed by entry. Another test, he thought as he manipulated the mechanism to its obvious final state and opened the door.

Inside, a large circular table stood prominently in the centre of a single room. The table was etched around its perimeter with a complex pattern of small tubes and holes and grooves, and was overlooked by an arrangement of display screens and control panels. It was by far the most sophisticated set of artefacts he had seen to that point. Initially it appeared inactive, the only light in the room coming from the outside through translucent windows, but a prominent switch on a panel by itself not far from the door brought everything to life once he had dared to flip it. Though the lighting in the room remained subdued, the panels lit up with a variety of flashing and static lights in various colours, and the monitor screens displayed pictograms and other graphics in what appeared to be a structured if indecipherable language. He manipulated the controls, which had the form of curved surfaces raised on plinths, and assessed how the displays changed as a result. Though the purpose of the mechanism remained a mystery for several minutes, the structure of the control system was not totally dissimilar to devices he had used many times in his past. It had clearly been intended for his use, or at least for the use of someone like him, and as he was the only one there the conclusion was obvious. Any system designed for use by human beings, anything intended to convert human thought into physical action, was likely to converge to one of a few forms, and touching ergonomically placed control surfaces was one of them. He could only trust that the designers of this machine had built in enough safeguards to prevent experimental use from having catastrophic consequences. In any well designed system, especially one for use by humans, the inevitable error part of trial and error ought not be too serious, and he hoped the Hosts were smart enough to know this.

His stroking of the control surfaces was having some feedback on the display screens, but at first it was difficult to tell what it meant. It was vaguely reminiscent of the kinds of languages he'd seen before. Those languages took many forms and had many names. Most recently, on OldEarth, it was godspeak - an obtuse combination of pictograms, abstract symbols and an odd sort of pidgin. The intention, apparently, was to impart information almost subliminally. It was the way whatever posthuman authorities were in charge chose to communicate with the likes of him. It had always been like that. He had never fully understood why. It certainly did not have to be the case - they could easily manifest themselves and simply talk to people. Something about keeping a respectable distance, about leaving unascended humans to exercise their own intellect as far as possible. In the past he was occasionally able to access intermediaries - demigods and priests and specially designated experts who could aid with the translations and help bridge the gap. But there were no intermediaries here, and to make matters worse this language was that of the Hosts with whom he shared no tangible heritage at all. He felt thoroughly out of his depth.

But suddenly the feedback he was getting began to make sense. Something he had done had put the device into a more apprehensible mode. There was still nothing in any language he understood, but the screens now showed images of objects he was quite familiar with - IceNeedle in its sheath, a pile of journals, a coil of rope, Thunderbuss - indeed each of the gifts he had been presented with was on display here, down to the unique motifs emblazoned on them, swapped from one to the other with a simple hand gesture against the controls. As each item was displayed a single control was made prominent on the board in front of him.

The general feel of this device, the way these panels and displays were arranged about a point of focus at the centre, though singular in itself, was not without precedence in his experience. The man felt as if he could guess what this machine was for and what would happen when he activated the main control, and was willing to put that hypothesis to the test. He cycled the displayed items through to the simplest and smallest of them, the tinderbox which was the first item he had been given, and pressed the indicated region of the panel. Immediately a milky fluid began to seep from small nozzles and across the surface of the central table. For a few seconds it behaved as might be expected, flowing in towards the middle, then it looked as if the flow was being directed by invisible obstructions and finally began defying gravity altogether, forming vertical projections. It looked like a living thing, like the growth of a strange white plant sped up many times, forming itself into a small rectangular block. The texture of the surface changed, becoming solid and gemlike, refracting the ambient light into a glittering pointillistic rainbow.

The man knew exactly what he was looking at. It was more or less exactly what he had anticipated. Tiny machines were being enlisted one by one to perform a simple task - for example to carry a small particle of matter to some defined location with respect to its neighbours, deposit it there and either hold it in place or return for further instructions. Individually they were far too small to be seen with the human eye, but they existed by the billions, and what could be seen was the bulk action of all of them taken in as a whole.

The surface of the block produced by this process changed again, solidifying into a matte white, and all activity stopped. The entire process had taken only a few minutes. He retrieved the finished item from the table, scraped off the chalky residue to reveal the tinderbox within, and compared it to the one on his tool belt. Notwithstanding an amount of wear and tear and the adaptations he had made for his own benefit they were identical.

That one was a test. This device could, in theory, fabricate any item of the appropriate size composed of the materials it had in stock, provided one knew how to describe that item in the language of the control system. What he really wanted at that moment was food. No doubt it could produce food, but he would need to work out how to tell it to produce food and that would take time, if he was able to work it out at all. Other than food the item he felt most in need of was a way to record what he was finding, primarily as an aid to his own memory. That was something he knew was available. He gestured through to the stack of blank journals and activated the fabricator.

He spent the next several hours - less the half hour or so it took the process to complete and the hour of darkness during the noon eclipse - recalling the events of the past days into a blank journal, making particular note of those parts of the City he had so far found to be worth noting. By the time he was done it was well into the afternoon and he made way, carrying a pile of blank journals, back to what he knew to be comfortable lodgings, but still with no food in his belly.

-Day 3303

"Saturday, March 3, 09: Morning. Now that the basics are taken care of I can start exploring this place properly."

He was sitting on top of the thick outer rampart not far from Entrance Park, watching the sun rising over the low hills that marked land in the distance, feet dangling over the precipice into the long drop to the sea below. Hidden beneath him, embedded deep within that wall, was the maze he had traversed to reach this point. He commented on this in the journal, and noted how much easier entry into the City would have been had he been able to walk across the top of the wall as he had just done. He was feeling satisfied after a restful night's sleep that had followed the first proper meal he'd had in many days. Prior to that food had been foremost on his mind. It would not do, he had told himself as he searched with growing desperation, to survive ten thousand kilometres of wilderness only to die of starvation in a structure clearly build as a dwelling place for his kind. It turned out that food, like anything, was not difficult to find if you knew where to look. Where to look was in the outskirts of the City along the inside of the perimeter wall - the rural hinterland. That made sense in hindsight, but in truth it was only on a whim that he had decided to explore along the outermost border to the north. It was there he had found an entire region of low structures lush with a huge variety of food items growing from the walls and roofs and corners and hollows. Moreover it was evident that this growth was not purely incidental - these were not weeds that had simply taken root there like much of the vegetation elsewhere in the City. There were kinds of food here that he had seen nowhere else on NewEarth - exotic vegetables and hybrid fruits that combined a variety of forms and flavours, and chicken meat, and slabs of beef bark extruded from the walls and floor - artificial, engineered raw ingredients specifically designed to sustain the primitive human form and culture in an artificial world, far removed from its original home. He knew it was that because while he had not seen this kind of food production on NewEarth, he had seen it before elsewhere, on Kruger and Orion, even Earth itself in the latter days.

That discovery had been the previous afternoon, and he had spent much of the evening sampling the various food selections on offer before returning, fully satisfied, to his chosen lodgings. Earlier that day he had made another discovery which he was also quite pleased about. Many of the buildings hid switches that would activate artificial lighting systems, either internal or in localised regions of the streets and alleys. They had a distinctive appearance and could usually be found low to the ground near doors and entrance ways. The find was important to him because his activities would no longer be restricted to daylight hours, and if he was honest he found the dark times in the City rather unnerving - even under the light of Lune. So now he felt he could begin a more thorough investigation of what this City had to offer, and what his purpose within it might be.

Continuing north past the food garden, he made his way along the outskirts of the City. Before long he came to a straight channel in which water flowed from the direction of the City's heart then out through a hole in the wall, presumably into the ocean beyond. It was amply crossed by several accessible bridges, and he was in the process of deciding which of them was the more convenient route to the other side when he noticed that at least one of them was clearly not designed for pedestrian traffic. Rather, it appeared to support a single rail not dissimilar to transportation systems he had known from previous lives. It continued in both directions as a track suspended from a series of tall pylons extending for as far as he could follow it. Intrigued and hopeful he scanned along what length he could see and, sure enough, found what appeared to be a carriage of sorts hanging from the rail at a height above the ground and some distance away. If it could be reached and proved operational, he thought, it might provide an easier means of traversing the place than walking.

With that in mind he made his way underneath the track towards the carriage, but he could see from some way off that there was no way of accessing it from the ground, not even a difficult way. There was, however, further back along the track a platform raised to a height that would reach the carriage had their positions coincided. Focussing his investigation now on this structure revealed that its upper level was indeed accessible by a series of ramps, steep steps and ladders and, moreover, contained a single manual control in the form of a large lever. The juxtaposition of elements so obviously pointed to one particular conclusion that he barely hesitated in pushing the lever forward. As it happened his assumption proved entirely correct. A light shower of dust shook free from the rail overhead and fell around him, as though this was the first time the mechanism had operated in decades, but it nevertheless lurched instantly to life and the carriage down the track sped away at a considerable pace. Trying to move the lever into reverse showed that, at least from that point of control, the system had only two speeds - fast and stop - and only one direction, which at that moment was the wrong direction.

He pushed the lever forward again and waited, unsure how long it would take for the rail carriage to come around again, or for another carriage to come along, or even if either possibility represented how the system worked. It appeared to operate as a simple continuous cable which he could see slide past rapidly through the rail above him, letting out a low whine as it did, so the assumption seemed a reasonable one. After several minutes a carriage did appear, speeding towards him from the opposite direction. But he released the lever too late, or the carriage decelerated too slowly, and it overshot the platform, passing uncomfortably close and stopping too far off the end to be reached. He tried again, this time paying closer attention at the expected time, and this time more successfully. The carriage stopped close enough to the platform end for him to comfortably step inside.

The layout of the cable car was spartan. There was a lever similar to the one on the platform and effectively nothing else - no seating or significant hand holds. It was wide open and windowless, but there was sufficient balustrading on most sides that there was little risk of falling out. There was standing room for perhaps a dozen people at a squeeze. He eased the lever forward and had to brace himself against the floor as the car accelerated sharply. The high wind that rushed through the open cabin when it had attained maximum speed, and the necessity of keeping the spring loaded lever held in the forward position made for an uncomfortable trip, but it was nonetheless quite exhilarating.

The car wove a series of broad arcs through the City, sometimes skirting close to the outer wall where its passenger was afforded views over the sea, sometimes flying in towards the centre where it ran between, and occasionally through, densely packed buildings, many of which seemed designed to accommodate its path. Its course often paralleled the transparent plastic tubes that he had already noticed running throughout much of the City he'd seen so far, here converging to and there diverging from the track of the rail car, not as tangled or as densely packed as those of the Jimitry or the Nest but still intricately entwined among the nooks and crannies between the buildings. Locating the central hub of this system, assuming there was one among these structures, might provide long sought answers. Where he was able to hold his face against the wind he had an excellent perspective on many other sites of interest, and he made a mental note of several places for closer inspection at a later time. He also passed over several stations similar to the one he had boarded from - indeed they appeared regularly every ten minutes or so - a welcome circumstance as the height of the carriage between stations would make it very difficult to alight safely otherwise. He had one or two practice runs at stopping precisely over a station and found it was not too difficult, provided he managed not to overshoot on the first attempt.

What he really wanted to do on that first trip was determine whether this system of transport had an ultimate destination, and if so what that was, or whether it operated on a continuous circuit. In the event it turned out the latter was the case. It ran a convoluted but essentially counter clockwise route that took it first to the north where it passed close to a transparent dome studded with broad transparent pipes which he took to be the central hub he was hoping to find, equivalent to the heart of the Jimitry. From there it ran to the west where it wove in and out of morning shade from the tallest peaks, then south along the western border that overlooked an ocean with no land in sight, then back to the east where the distant shore began to feel familiar again, and finally to the initial station just shy of the river where he was able to park conveniently and disembark. In addition to the Jimitry hub, the route had passed a number of features of note including two more of the wide water courses, making three in total, and another continuous track that looked to be a secondary transport system. That one was more substantial in girth, more like a superhighway than a monorail, and ran radially towards the heart of the City while curving upwards in an immense arc.

The entire circuit had, he estimated, taken about three hours. He returned with enough time to get back to his residence before the start of the noon darkening. There he recorded the morning's events while they were still fresh in his mind, and updated plans for future explorations in the light of this new discovery.

-Day 3376

The morning was clear save for a few scattered clouds that hid the sunrise, but it followed several days of heavy rain and blustery winds accompanied by violent thunderstorms. The play of wind and thunder echoing between the tallest of the nearby buildings and the even taller ones more distant had resulted in a terrifying yet strangely musical cacophony of sounds, like a band of titans playing bagpipe and organ in a cosmic concert. The lightning too, especially in the dark times of the day and night, flashing sparks that bounced around the crystal skyscrapers near the mid-City added to the spectacular theatre. There were times he thought the taller structures that appeared so slender and fragile in the distance could not possibly hold up against that onslaught, and their inevitable collapse would domino its way around until the entire City lay in a pile of ruins, but the warm light of the clear morning revealed no sign of damage. If anything the weather had freshened everything and the newly polished surfaces seemed to glisten in the morning sun even more becomingly than usual. Water continued to cascade off rooftop catchments and fall onto the streets below or find its way through channels and aqueducts into the East Canal where he sat bringing in the morning. Previously the canal had been a trickle compared to the torrent of water that now gushed through the wall into the sea. The sound of falling or flowing water surrounded him.

Most of the rainy days he had spend inside. In the days before the rain, and the weeks before that, he had continued to explore the areas of the City along the perimeter locally to Entrance Park and the East Canal. He had found several more food markets - gardens of fruiting trees that grew with abandon in the suburbs north of the canal - peach and mango and date - as well as more industrial hydroponic arrangements of vegetable farms, and an exotic artificial food production facility to the south of Entrance Park which continuously manufactured, among other staples, very passable substitutes for eggs, meat and cream. He called them markets knowing it was an archaic term that was not relevant. There was nothing mercantile about this place, but at least he wouldn't starve.

He had also located six more fabrication facilities just within the small area of exploration. It appeared they were a common feature throughout the whole City, much as they were in other cities he had known, and he estimated there must be dozens in total. For the most part they were identical to the one he had found first, with the same limited range of products in its repertoire. There was one, however, that was larger and more complex than the others. It was secured by a locking mechanism similar in style but somewhat less trivial to solve, comprising four concentric rings embedded in the surface of the door, each independently movable and each etched with one or more sections of curved track. Only when positioned correctly could the bolt be slid in a single move from centre to outside, whereupon the lock was freed and the door sprung open. It was a simple enough puzzle which he solved by visual inspection alone in less than a minute, but a puzzle nonetheless. He was still being tested. Once inside, this fabricator proved to have more flexible controls and a wider range of items it was able to manufacture. He had yet to investigate the true range of its capabilities, but he did manage to design and fabricate better fitting and more comfortable footwear than he'd had before, as well as a backpack to carry bulky items.

Further to that he had traversed the monorail circuit several times and made careful note of the stations and those features in the vicinity of each that stood out as interesting. As it turned out there were eighteen stations in total, and he numbered them in order of direction around the route, number one being the first one he had used and was using again that morning to start the next round of exploration. Station Five was where he planned to commute. Station Five was the hub of the local Jimitry whose transparent tendrils were ubiquitous throughout the rest of the City that he had so far seen.

That hub was like the ones he had encountered earlier in some ways, but different in others. The entire structure was less densely convoluted than the Jimitry or the Nest, and at its core the clear dome atop the broad and tall pedestal was broader and taller than those had been. From the core, eight thick transparent tunnels emerged and dispersed among the other buildings of the City, like the arms of an octopus - a metaphor which immediately suggested an appellation for this structure. Like the Nest it was intact, its flexible covering held taut by internal pressure, but unlike that one it was entirely empty, devoid of any wasp-like insects or even the remnants of previous life as the Jimitry had held.

What the Octopus did have that he had not seen before was a way inside.

On the base of the pedestal at ground level was a large, heavy-duty hatch operated by a wheel lock. He debated for a moment the wisdom of using the door, but in the end curiosity gained the upper hand and he turned the wheel, reasoning that if it was not meant to be opened it would not open. It turned easily several times clockwise before it stopped. He had to push the door inwards with considerable force against the pressure, but there was a hiss of escaping air and the hatch slid aside. Behind the opening was an ante chamber with a similar hatch and wheel arrangement on the opposite wall. Disregarding caution, he tried the second wheel without hesitation, but found that it would not budge in either direction. Reasoning that the chamber could function as an airlock, but foolishly neglecting to follow the implications of that supposition, he closed the first hatch and tightened it down, then tried the second hatch again. This time the wheel turned effortlessly. It took far more force to push the door open, and only when the extended rush of outflowing air began to hurt his eardrums did he have the first inkling that this might not have been a sensible idea. But the rushing air subsided and he was able to equalise the pressure difference in his ears, and soon was breathing normally once more.

Behind the door a steep but otherwise ordinary looking spiral stairway corkscrewed upwards to where what he took to be daylight was visible some distance above. He had only begun to climb the stairs when he realised something else was wrong, and with that came further realisation that his haste in coming through those doors might have been a mistake. He was feeling light headed and dizzy, his ears were ringing and the ringing was getting louder, and his vision was narrowed as if seen through the wrong end of a viewfinder. He felt on the verge of passing out, and moreover that passing out here would be a bad move. As quickly as he could without panicking he climbed back into the airlock, pulled the inner door shut and locked it down with the wheel. For a frightening moment he thought he might not have the strength to pull the outer hatch back against the pressure inside, but bracing himself against the frame he managed to open a crack large enough and for long enough for the pressures to equalise, then he wrenched the door back, jumped out and slumped to the ground breathing heavily.

As he shook the last of the unusual symptoms from his senses he chided himself for taking such a foolhardy risk with so little thought. Clearly the inside of this structure, whatever it was for, was not a place human beings were intended to breathe and live as if it were natural for them. But that truth had implications that were so far outside his own experiences, even over several lifetimes, that perhaps a lack of caution was not such an obvious error. If he was not supposed to go through those doors why were there doors at all? And why were they so easy to operate when entering nearly every other structure of importance in this City, including the City itself, had required some sort of test to prove his worthiness?

-Day 3440

"Wednesday, July 20, 09: Evening. Watching the sunset over the ocean."

He had climbed to the top of High Tower which itself sat atop a stylised range of tall mountains overlooking the Western Art District and beyond that far out to sea. Even at that height there was no sign of land in that direction, lending credence to his theory that the City marked the western end of a major land mass. That didn't matter - he was done pushing overland in any case. He had found what he was looking for. Now he just had to work out what it meant, and that looked set to be a life's work.

That evening came at the end of a day, and indeed several days prior, of wandering through a part of the City on the western shore that previously he had simply passed over on the monorail. It was not dissimilar to other regions to the north and south he had already visited - places where the structures were less formal in appearance than the rest of the City - less clinical and more ... free form, even whimsical. There were simple geometric shapes such as polyhedra and cylinders, some were plain or coloured in flat monotones, others were intricately carved or painted in multi hues, though not with designs that represented anything to him. Others had more complex geometries - loops and knots and curvaceous sheets. He called these places art galleries because that was the immediate impression they conveyed - cultural centres for displaying works of abstract impressionism for no purpose other than entertainment or aesthetic pleasure. Of course there was no way he could tell if that was their true intent, or indeed if that was not the intent of much of the rest of the City. Some of the structures were faintly reminiscent of the architectural styles of ancient cultures from his own heritage - Egyptian pyramids, Greek temples, Romanesque cathedrals - though the scales and details were all wrong. Or maybe his recollections were wrong. Nevertheless it was equally possible these galleries were a reference to that history that had been delivered into an alien realm along with his own person. The designs not even remotely familiar to him may have come from cultures and histories that had no place in his memory. He had, after all, lived long enough to see his own people diverge in ways that even he found mysterious.

What he had never seen in these art districts, or anywhere else in the City, or for that matter anywhere else on the planet, was a direct representation of any living thing. There were no statues depicting the human form, no paintings of animals, no designs that might be taken to depict a fish or an insect or even a leaf or a flower - not even stylistically or inaccurately. The only things representing a living form were those forms themselves - the plants that grew wild along the streets or in the parks, the birds that flew among the buildings and nested on the high ledges, the spiders whose webs he sometimes had to brush from the doorway of a new building before he entered. Any resemblances that did exist were purely incidental and were more a function of his own imagination than any likely intention of the creators. In fact there was very little that represented any objective reality - no maps or models or photographs or paintings depicting a still life or a landscape. It was not as if the Hosts were ignorant of the shape of terrestrial life. They had, after all, renovated a whole world and populated it from scratch with that very life. Anything that necessitated some nod to the form of the human body for practical or ergonomic reasons did so to the minimum degree. It was an omission which, once noticed, became glaring and obvious.

Nor had he found any written records, at least not in anything he even remotely recognised as a language. No libraries or books or instructive plaques or descriptive labels. Neither the story of this world nor his own history and heritage had been recorded, as far as he had discovered to that point. It seemed an almost deliberate attempt to limit how much of human history they wanted to reconstruct, while still retaining an undeniably human origin. Over the course of his life and his travels he had seen how the ruling agencies, those forms of human descendants holding sovereignty in any given place, had become more and more inscrutable and aloof, purposefully keeping their distance from more primal representatives of the race - people like him. Perhaps that trend was being continued here. He was being given the task of retaining his own story, or perhaps the choice to erase it and start again.

He continued to gaze out over the ocean long after the sun had set, and the strange forms of the Art District took on an air of even greater mystery under the light of the half-moon than they already had in full daylight. Behind him the vast bulk of the City loomed above and spread out to either side like a ghostly giant silently mocking his own meagre height over sea level. Evenings had always been a time for reflection. Even as a child growing up on Earth the close of the day felt like something being lost, the promises of the morning being held up for judgement - kept or broken but never again available for further action. In the hard times that was the period of melancholy, when depression and despair threatened to take control of the soul. He had also spent a lot of time in places where there was no evening - no sunrise or sunset in anything like the normal sense, places where a person was forced to set the contract for the day by whatever terms they wanted. He had never been able to decide which was the worse.

Here he had achieved a victory, reached a final goal, yet the meaning of any of it still eluded him so the victory was a hollow one at best.

There were residential blocks not very far off, rooms with a soft bed and a bath where he had spent the previous night and the one before that, but the evening was calm and he felt more inclined to spend the night where he was than to descent from this high place in the semi dark to look for more cozy lodgings.

-Day 3523

"Tuesday, October 13, 09: Morning. Today I will try - again - to reach City Core."

In the previous months he had made several attempts to reach the very heart of the City, but had been turned back each time. It remained a tantalisingly mysterious thing, visible from every other location as an unfathomably tall peak that was frequently lost in clouds, its inner details hidden behind an impenetrably dense wall of majestic skypunchers. It was a place that simple logic dictated had to exist but, like the legendary lands beyond the border of ancient explorers' charts, was indicated on his hand drawn maps with nothing more than a shaded region and the phrase "here be dragons".

The first attempt had been by the superhighway. He discovered quickly that it was not a highway - rather it turned out to be a long continuous tube with a flat roof, easily flat enough at the start and wide enough to serve as a multilane road but for the absence of any cars. He did manage to clamber onto the top and walk for several hours, unencumbered by very much in the way of structure on the surface as buildings rose in height around him, until the gradually increasing slope and the observation that in the distance the slope only got worse with no actual destination in sight, convinced him to abandon the attempt. At that point he could see it extend before him and upwards as a single continuous ribbon, tapered by perspective into a thread. He reasoned there may still have been a transport system inside the thing. There was indeed a way in, a door in a kind of terminal building that marked its far outer end, but the locking mechanism on the door had him temporarily stumped.

Failing that, he had taken the monorail to Station Eighteen which he judged to be the closest stop to the Core. In the region of Station Eighteen the rail car would speed between tall spires that towered overhead, coming uncomfortably close to the walls of those on either side. The station itself was inside a single crystal skypuncher, architecturally deformed in its lower levels to make room for the rail line to pass through. But that was a dead end. From Station Eighteen there was no way to reach the ground, or move closer to the centre of the City, or go anywhere else for that matter other than a single building that turned out to house another fabrication facility.

More than once he had tried simply walking the distance at ground level, through the streets and lanes and alleys between buildings, starting from different points and approaching from different directions. He had managed to penetrate far into the deep parts of the City where the streets were in permanent shadow - permanent except, ironically, just before and just after midnight when the bright lunar light reached all the way to the ground and created a strange moire pattern overhead with the tops of the spires. In those regions day was distinguished from night only by the multiple refractions of sunlight that produced a shattered rainbow of colour high in the sky, like a vast kaleidoscope. As he moved inwards buildings not only became taller but closer together, until eventually it became impossible to pass between them. It had an eerie feel in the semi dark, like being lost in an increasingly menacing forest - claustrophobic and suffocating in two of the three dimensions, soaring and open in the third and totally immobilising in all but one. And still he had not reached the Core itself - not by a long way.

Now he had planned another attempt. He had discovered on the western side starting from Station Ten, a region where the height of the spires did not rise as sharply heading towards the Core as in other parts of the City, and indeed seemed to level off over a large area. The tops of those spires were connected by a series of walkways, albeit disturbingly narrow for their elevation and lacking any form of balustrade. He felt that if any place would afford direct access to the City Core it would be along those walkways, but he was scarcely an hour into the journey before he realised that the true focus of this region was a large, black, hemispherical dome to which the path he was on inexorably led. Entry into the dome was blocked by yet another of those infuriating tests of his mental dexterity. Annoyed though he was at constantly being put to the proof with these locking mechanisms, he had come to associate them with places that had special importance. Evidently the Hosts were not just testing him, not merely toying with him for their own inscrutable amusement, but educating him on what needed attending to.

In this case the puzzle took the form of a simple combination lock. Three rotating tumblers, each displaying three coloured faces - red, pale milky blue and a deep purple, evidently needed to be positioned correctly to unlock the door. It was trivially, almost insultingly easy to solve. There being only twenty seven distinct positions it would have been possible to try all of them in a few minutes, and in any case a symmetric spread of coloured smudges across the top of the otherwise flat black of the door gave the game away entirely. With that clue in hand he had the door open on the first try.

The interior of the structure was pitch dark apart from the ambient daylight streaming in through the open door, and a faint red light at floor level in the distance which he judged to be roughly, and therefore probably exactly, at the centre of the dome. As far as he could tell from what little light there was, the floor was flat and relatively unobstructed, so he made his way towards the middle, the metallic sound of his footsteps echoing in what was otherwise lonely silence.

The source of the red light was a circular pedestal at about waist height, illuminated around the edge and topped with a number of controls. The controls looked remarkably primitive which hopefully, he thought, also meant simple and intuitive - whatever they were for. There was what looked like a moveable joystick in the middle, with two prominent pushbuttons on either side, and three sliders, each of them set to a different position. There were also two narrow and oddly shaped slots, one next to one of the sliders and the other in a central position on its own. Nothing was labelled, not even unintelligibly. He pressed one of the buttons and released it. Nothing happened. He pressed it again. Still nothing ... except ... no - there was something. Something flashed in the corner of his eye. He pressed the button a third time and looked around while he held it. A small green spot of light was being projected from somewhere - he could not immediately tell where - onto the roof of the dome almost overhead. He released the button and the spot was gone. Pressed and released, there and gone. A definite effect.

He pressed the second button.

This time there was no mistaking the effect. Almost immediately the domed walls around him dissolved away leaving him standing in broad daylight, in the middle of a wide circular metal floor on top of a tower, the elevated walkway he had recently traversed stretching away. Some light cloud drifted across the blue sky near the horizon, which was just visible alongside the edge of the plateau, and the faint greying of the sky directly overhead marked the position of Lune, barely visible against the glare of the afternoon sun nearby. He pressed the button again. Once more he was plunged into darkness, opaque curved walls surrounding him on all sides. A faint sense of recognition and understanding began to creep into his mind. He pressed the button again, returning the visage to the outside world. Now he moved the joystick. Nothing changed. He selected one of the three sliders and tried to move it - it did not budge, not even slightly. He tried a second slider. It moved easily, and as it did the sun and sky faded as if viewed through heavy sunshades, disappearing into darkness only with the slider pushed all the way to the left. He moved it back to the right, past its initial position, and was forced to close his eyes as the ambient glare ramped up beyond tolerable levels. He reset it to a comfortable position and tried the third slider. The effect felt like he was being transported at high speed to a point on the horizon where what had previously been a small cloud loomed like a bank of hazy fog in front of him. So sudden and unexpected was the sense of motion that he instinctively grabbed for the control pedestal against a flood of vertigo. He manipulated the joystick again and the focus of the magnification shifted to a blank patch of sky which expanded until the whole dome was a flat blue hue. The recognition and significance of this find registered simultaneously and immediately, and he knew this was a place he would be spending a lot of time from now on - starting tonight.

The Hosts had provided him with a telescope.

He had used instruments like this before. On the Citadel of Orion, he recalled, there was a scope of very similar design. There it had actually been considered rather primitive, more a toy for the amusement of humans than a serious instrument of science, at least when compared to the vastly larger and more sophisticated telescopes used by the Overlords to map those parts of the cosmos they had not yet visited, or to receive news from those they had. But with it he had been able to watch the construction of far off colonies, or see those stars around which simple life had been found, or witness the birth of new stars and the death of old ones, all with the turn of his head. Here, with the night sky so impoverished to the naked eye, he wondered if the same range of observations would be available, but there was little doubt he could learn much with this device.

He wanted to test a suspicion, suggested by experience with this type of scope in the past. He went outside and some distance along the walkway where he placed his backpack. Then he returned and satisfied himself that the pack was clearly visible in the telescope's display and could be magnified and examined in close-up like anything else in the environment. The device, as expected, displayed its images in real time - at least as real time as was possible for an instrument of astronomy - not an archival snapshot or a simulation, not a planetarium. As hoped, the controls were intuitive and easy to use, though he was still unsure of the function of the third slider. Or, for that matter, of the green marker. It seemed to correspond roughly with the position of the sun, even when that position was distorted away from the focus of magnification, and even as the sun sank further to the west as the afternoon proceeded. But indicating where the sun was in the field of view seemed a superfluous function for so prominent a control, and in any case the correspondence was not precise.

Those were mysteries to be solved another time.

For now he was keen to survey the surface of Lune in detail. As its crescent face broadened through the afternoon, more and more of it became illuminated. Much of the surface was shrouded in cloud, but there were enough areas of uncovered ground that he could clearly see the shadows of mountain ranges and other surface features, especially along the slowly shifting terminator that bordered day and night. It was unfortunate that the design of the telescope did not afford a comfortable viewing position for lengthy observations, but he found that by lying on his back and looking straight up, only occasionally returning to the console to adjust position or magnification, he was able to take in all he wanted. Features that had become familiar to him took on an entirely new dimension of depth and perspective. Clouds looked like clouds, mountain ranges looked like mountain ranges. He could see vast tracts of flat dark red plain that were featureless even at high magnification except for structures that cast discernible shadows even against the glossy near black of the surface surrounding them, shadows that shifted with the motion of the sun. Up close they must have been huge. He could see the distinctive and very recognisable outline of terramines, some of which trailed long plumes of vapour in the prevailing winds. It was more evident now than ever it had been before that this was no mere moon in an incidental orbit around NewEarth, but a planet in its own right, every bit as vibrant and most probably alive and in every respect the equal of the world he had come to call home. And finally, with the sun straddling the horizon at the moment of sunset, the lunar face was at its half phase and the one feature he had been most intrigued about - the Small Brown Spot - was just moving into daylight, fortunately at that moment apparently enjoying as fine a morning as his own afternoon had been. It was dead to centre, which put it as close to directly overhead as any point in the sky, and now the magnified view - with detailed textures visible and with a long triangular shadow cast far across the surface, dominating everything near to it - confirmed a suspicion he had been harbouring for a long time. Similar in size and shape, and directly opposed in position - this was a twin of his own City.

The green marker, still tracking the position of the sun, was now projected onto the floor just below the western horizon.

With the fall of night he turned the attention of his new found eyes to the seemingly blank space away from the lunar surface. That face brightened even as the twilight darkened, and its light scattering through the atmosphere, much as the sun's did, diminished the contrast with anything that might be present. There were, nonetheless, things there to be seen - ghostly blemishes that occasionally whizzed past as he scanned back and forth under the highest magnification. If he managed to bring one of these to a standstill within the field of view he was greeted with a fuzzy vision of spiral arms or the elongated edge of a galactic disk. Adjusting the brightness served only to increase that of the surrounding sky and failed to significantly enhance the clarity of the image.

He waited patiently for midnight and the onset of the lunar eclipse, when the sky would be at its darkest and clearest, but alas as that time approached the clouds thickened to the point where even Lune itself became little more than a slightly brighter patch of haze overhead. There would be no more observations of the cosmos that night.

-Day 3540

"Friday, October 30, 09: Morning. I have solved the lock on the door to the superhighway."

There had been several days of moderate rain, followed by several more of heavy fog, during which he kept as much indoors or under shelter as he could. The City became especially eerie in gloomy weather, and the inner regions in fog were particularly unsettling. So he spent much of that time in his study collating, revising and editing records of his explorations - maps, codes and other items of potentially useful information. The study, which had been designated and furnished largely by his own effort, occupied a single room hut on the south eastern suburbs close to Station Sixteen. It also served as a library for the storage of journals - indeed the site had been chosen because it had been found with a large and perfectly serviceable, if initially empty, bookshelf along one wall. A table and chair had been commandeered from nearby dwellings on the very reasonable assumption that they would not be missed. This, along with the neighbouring cottage furnished for sleeping, had become his preferred residence, proximity to food and transport being the deciding factors.

When the weather cleared the previous afternoon and he ventured out once more, he turned his attention to the door at the base of the long curved highway that ran into the City Core. Of course he knew it wasn't a highway - most of its length was at too steep an angle, and most roads don't have doors - but it was one of the more prominent structures in the City and its true purpose still eluded him, so he retained the name coined by first impressions until a better impression could be found. And the door possessed one of the more elaborate locks he had seen, so he was especially interested to discover what was inside.

Like many of the others, the lock required a slider to be passed along a moveable track until it reached the position at which it could be removed, thereby unlatching the door. Also like the others the mechanism, though appearing flimsy to a casual look, proved far too sturdy to be bypassed by any force he was able to bring to bear against it. He had to solve the puzzle to get in. Unlike the others, which in the end had been relatively simple, this one employed sections of track that needed to be brought into alignment and could only be manipulated indirectly through a secondary series of controls. It was the kind of puzzle that could be solved by trial and error, given enough time or a good deal of luck, or simply and directly with the aid of a little algebra if the right abstract model was known. After trying the former approach for many minutes without success he had noted down all the relevant parameters and returned to his study to work on the problem at leisure. He found it intriguing that the Hosts had wanted to test his grasp of mathematical abstraction in this way. It was also rather fortunate that he possessed the required skills to pass the test. As a younger man he had never been especially good at, or interested in, mathematics. It was only later, much later in life, during a period when he was studying disciplines of all kinds as a substitution for gainful employment, that its wonders had been opened up to him. He had been fascinated by its ability to describe, in the purest terms, truths that applied to the dirty details of mundane life, and to establish connections between parts of reality that were otherwise wholly unrelated. He was especially fascinated by the perennially open question of whether it was a discipline that would be discovered by minds that had evolved independently of humanity. It seemed he might now be uniquely placed to find an answer to that.

Armed with the calculated solution to the door he caught the monorail to Station Twelve and worked his way back along the base of the highway to its terminus. The code that he had established with considerable mental effort worked with satisfying ease, the sliders lined up perfectly and within five minutes of arriving he was inside the building beneath the road. Within five minutes more his nomenclature for this place and his understanding of its purpose had changed completely. Almost completely. He had been correct in guessing it was a system of transport, but it was a mode of transport entirely different from what he'd expected.

The small chamber was dominated by a tank into which fluid was continuously flowing from three pipes positioned above it. The tank had long ago been filled and the overflow was spilling rapidly down the sides, through a grating that served as a false floor and into the true floor beneath where it quickly drained away and, presumably, was being recycled. The liquid superficially resembled water, crystal clear and colourless, but did not reflect the light in quite the same way, nor did it sound quite the same as it trickled and dripped, and the patterns of its flow made it appear somehow less viscous than water. He stepped up to the tank and looked in, letting the substance wash over him. It had a silky feel on his skin and was neither warm nor cool, as if it had exactly the temperature of the surrounding air. He knew it wasn't water, but he also knew it wasn't dangerous. In fact in some ways it was less dangerous than water. Inside the tank he found what he was expecting to find - a hollow transparent partial sphere, its refraction of the light matching that of the liquid so closely that it was visible only by those parts protruding above the surface. It was large enough to hold a single slightly cramped human being. In fact it was intended for just that purpose.

It was a cannonball, and the structure he had taken for a road was the barrel of the cannon.

Its existence carried implications he felt ill equipped to handle at that moment. It was not uncertainty - he knew exactly what this thing was and what it was for - nor was it fear, though in truth both emotions were part of the mix. Rather it was a sense of moral outrage. It was as if he was being asked - being tempted - to commit a crime - a crime he had been conditioned through decades of indoctrination to find repellent, yet at the same time had been a fantasy of his own and indeed of his entire race from its beginning, and might even have been thought the very reason for him being there at all. Now he had been given the means and the opportunity. He had been given a new task. All he needed was the courage to carry it out.

-Day 3548

Much of the last eight days or so had been spent at the Observatory, observing - and contemplating. He had even taken to spending nights there, the better to view Lune at its clearest, and catching sleep during the day. There were other things to see in the sky. At midnight, when that sky was dark, he had found it not entirely lacking objects of interest. There were stars here, very few and very faint even in the enhanced sensitivity of the telescope. There were fuzzy nebulae and galaxies whose spiral faces and elongated edges were unmistakable, though still small even at the limits of the instrument's resolution. He was himself, apparently, not within one of these. He had also determined that the mysterious green pointer was aimed not at the sun as he had first thought, but at a fixed point in the sky that only coincidentally lay behind the sun when he had first discovered it. Day by day it was moving westward away from the sun and now it was rising half an hour before dawn. By this assumption and some careful measurements made with the aid of some makeshift instruments he had determined that the true year of this planet was between three hundred and eighty and four hundred days. He chose not to revise his calendar - it was too firmly entrenched, and the reality of too little practical importance. In any case, he thought, the initial guess of three hundred and sixty days had been remarkably close.

Yet he still did not know what the green marker was pointing at, what it was that the Hosts wanted him to see. By the time it had risen past the tall towers that blocked the eastern horizon it was already broad daylight and all but the brightest of celestial objects washed out of the sky.

So most observations were of Lune, features that had captivated him for years now brought to life in wondrous detail. He observed it during its cycle of phases when the border between night and day threw surface textures into sharp relief. He observed it through the night when its whole face was crisp and clear and illuminated by its own bright daylight. He observed it during the midday solar eclipse when his day and its night were at their respective darkest, and vice versa at the midnight lunar eclipse. He could see patches of blue ocean surrounded by vast expanses of almost black red ocean, regions of which were dotted with large numbers of what seemed to be tiny islands. He could see rolling hills and mountain ranges, dark green plains, zones of brown and dirty yellow and lighter shades of green. He could see huge cyclones with clouds circling so fast that he could perceive their motion, storms forming and dissipating, lightning so intense that occasionally he glimpsed individual bolts stretching across the face. He could see aurorae light up the polar regions top and bottom on the night side. With the face at its darkest the sparse points of light he had noted on previous occasions could, in at least some cases, be identified as violently active terramines glowing with white heat as they carried on the process of forming and fixing the surface. Others were not so readily classified. They resolved into clusters of fainter lights or small regions of diffusely glowing surface that revealed no further detail even at the highest magnification.

Observing Lune as closely as he was now felt almost voyeuristic. That was not his home, it belonged to someone else, someone who might not want their privacy invaded as he was doing. It was a thought born of a lifetime, indeed several lifetimes indoctrinated under a principle that valued leaving well enough alone. Yet his very existence here was a violation of that principle. He had asked - had been asked - to set it aside, and apparently had been given permission.

With the sun high in the sky and details of Lune faded by its night and washed out by his day, he switched off the telescope, dimming the domed space, and stretched out on the floor to rest. Idly he cast his eyes over the underside of the plinth that carried the telescope controls, even as his mind wandered into other concerns. There was a single grey rectangular plate set against the otherwise featureless white surface, barely visible in the dim ambient light. He must have been staring at it for several minutes before it suddenly registered in his consciousness as being rather out of place there. Reaching out he pulled it off, half expecting it to be an access panel to the inner workings of the control, but it came away as if stuck there magnetically, revealing nothing beneath other than a continuation of the surface. The object in his hand was a strip of metal with a series of small indents and protrusions along some of its edges. Its general size and shape prompted an immediate association in his mind, as if he had accidentally found something he should have been actively looking for. He stood up and examined the object more closely by the light of the control panel, and then tried it with each of the two slots whose function to that point had been a mystery. It fitted neatly, though only in one of the slots, and only in one orientation. With acute anticipation he turned the key in the lock.

Immediately he found himself surrounded by ghostly images - images of spheres, and spheres circling spheres, and tracks and markers and pointers, all floating in the air or moving around him or through him with no hint of a tactile presence, though looking every bit a solid as any real object. It was the kind of display he would have referred to as a hologram, though in the full knowledge that, strictly speaking, that was an inaccurate description. More important was what it meant. It was the representation of a planetary system in orbit around a star - an orrery.

The scale was all wrong, but he found that by deft manipulation of the telescope controls, here conscripted to a new purpose, he could correct for that, or he could zoom in to enhance detail or out to get a broad picture. He had seen many displays similar to this, indeed he had seen many displays identical to this. Its signature was unmistakable, and it was almost inconceivably unlikely that the system it was intended to represent was other than the one he recognised immediately. The eight principal orbs, along with countless minor ones each in their proper place, the sixth with its prominent rings, the fifth with its large size and streaked air, the third with its outsized moon. This was the place of his birth - his true and original birth, not hatched from an artificial womb, not transported to from afar. There, on that third planet depicted here was where he had begun. It was where the whole chain of being of which he was a part had begun. In the primordial chemistry of that world life had not only emerged, it had continued to evolve for four billion years before coming to occupy its entire galaxy, and now was spreading its influence to other galaxies as well. He should know. He was part of it - perhaps the sole member of the original species from that original planet who had been made part of it. The very audacity of the idea suddenly felt almost absurd.

He zoomed in close to the Earth until it was a blue ball floating before him. Every detail was clear on the surface of the model, the continents, Africa and North America and Australia, his first home within this old home, and the white cap of Antarctica, the smaller land masses, Great Britain and Japan and Indonesia, the great oceans of water between them painted in as flat blue. He had not seen those places in over five hundred years by his own reckoning of time, not even as a representation - not a model or a map or a photograph. It had been a deliberate choice, made at the time he left that world behind, to cut ties to it completely. For five hundred years he had kept that promise. He had never looked it up or sought information about what was happening there even though that information would have been readily available. For most of that five hundred years any information would have been hopelessly out of date before he ever saw it. Yet he had never managed to remove the memory of it from his mind, and at some point he had realised he didn't want to. Seeing it again it all looked so familiar, so comforting - like an old acquaintance - yet at the same time so very strange and unexpected. Of all times and places, seeing it again now, and here.

He watched the image spin around him for several minutes more, his mind awash with a confusion of conflicting feelings and long faded memories. Memories from his own childhood and that of his race, of a time when the tiny third planet of that solar system was the only world anyone had ever known. Now he had all but forgotten where it was. When he felt that his nostalgic reveries had gone on long enough he turned the key, dismissing the display, and sat down in the darkness.

-Day 3601

"Wednesday, January 1, 10: Morning. Happy New ... Decade ..."

Ten years, he repeated to himself as he travelled the monorail to Station Thirteen. The thought was more a commiseration than a celebration. Ten years alone on a world he didn't really understand, shuffling his way from one insecurity to another, with no real aims or purposes other than those he had imposed on himself. Of course he knew that span of time was an arbitrary one, an invention of his mind with no objective importance. But then his own mind was all he really had. In the end the conscious self comprises little more than memories and goals, separated from each other only by the shard of time that is the present moment. For that reason alone a measure of the passage of time and its divisions, irrespective of how that measure mapped onto reality, was important to him.

Station Thirteen was close to the Prime Fabricator. That was the name adopted for the one fabricator he had managed to coax into producing items better - and different - from the other dozen or so he had so far discovered. Even so the output thus far had been limited to a few articles of clothing, with enough control to adjust the fit, and a few simple geometric shapes he hoped eventually to combine into useful articles. The plan for this anniversary was to further explore the capabilities of that machine.

He activated the control panel and called up the menu of pre-designed artefacts, scrolling past those he had already tried or were of no interest. One item came to his attention - a kind of face mask that he had noticed before but had dismissed as looking more ornamental than functional. It did occur to him that fashion accessories were rather out of character for the Hosts, so he thought now to construct the object and try to ascertain what it was really for. White foam crept from feed nozzles to the centre of the construction plate where it formed a slowly expanding lump that throbbed and pulsated and adjusted its rough shape for half an hour, before solidifying into the familiar chalky mass encasing the finished product. He pulled the object from its shell and turned it over in his hands, puzzled. It vaguely resembled a diver's breathing regulator, with a piece that was clearly meant to be held in the mouth, two smaller pieces for insertion into the nostrils and an adjustable strap for holding the whole assembly snugly over the nose and lower face. It was compact and light weight, with just enough bulk at the front to house an intricate internal mechanism of unknown purpose. He tried it on in what felt like the most natural configuration, adjusting it to a firm fit. It was possible to breathe, though not easily or comfortably, but other than that it seemed to have no effect.

He slid the mask into his pack and spent the next few hours experimenting with ways of manipulating the fabricator controls to construct objects of his own design. He had managed in previous trials to build simple geometric forms - spheres and tubes and blocks from which he could carve negative shapes in a virtual environment before realizing the actual thing in a variety of materials and a range of scales. The plan was to eventually combine these skills to produce more complex functional items - a bicycle, he thought, might be a useful thing to aim for - though he was not quite at that stage yet. It was only when he had returned to the study and was writing up the day's findings that he examined the mask again, and a thought came to him as to what it could be for. He made a plan to put that idea to the test first thing the next day.

-Day 3602

Immediately after breakfast he took the monorail to Station Five carrying the face mask and a metal crowbar he'd fabricated as part of a growing kit of simple but useful tools. He hadn't been back to the heart of the Octopus since he'd been almost trapped inside it the first time, and had decided then not to try that particular stunt again. Now, however, he possessed something that, just maybe, would make a second attempt more successful. Moreover, if that was the case he had been given a clear nudge in the direction of trying it. He stepped into the airlock and closed the door behind him, but not before readying the crowbar for use on it should the need arise. Then he tightened the mask to a comfortable seal around his face and pushed open the inner door. Almost instantly after the pressure difference had stabilised he noticed that breathing through the mask became much easier - almost normal. A good sign, he thought. He waited for a few minutes in the airlock, ready to close the door in an instant. Nothing. He waited a few more minutes, long past the time taken for a reaction the first time, and felt perfectly fine. He had his proof. The Hosts intended for him to come in here and had provided the means to do it. Now, like everything else in his life at that time, he had to work out why.

He mounted the stairs and emerged into an open space. The scene around him was familiar - the spires of the City, a view of the ocean to the north, the monorail track sweeping past nearby with Station Five further in the distance to the south east, the morning sun at its nine o'clock position, the waning crescent of Lune overhead. But he was seeing it now from the inside of the transparent dome, breathing foreign air of unknown composition through a respiratory aid of unknown mechanism. The familiarity of the landscape outside only made the whole situation feel all the more alien. Yet the surface of the platform was also familiar - a dark green, almost black garden bed, irregular, as if it had been roughly and randomly laid down, but it was not soil. Rather it was a spongy material - full of tiny holes - firm enough to walk on without difficulty, but leaving faint footprints as he walked. He bent down and tried to dig into it with his bare hands. It shredded with only moderate force and he was able to pull large chunks out of the ground. It was the same as far down as he managed to dig. He stepped up to the surface of the dome and put his hands on it. It felt solid initially, but pushing harder produced enough movement to suggest it was flexible, bowed under the pressure within.

Apart from that there was nothing here to see. The place was empty, devoid of the life in the Nest or anything else of interest.

Tubes of the same transparent material as the dome radiated away from the main hub in eight directions from roughly ground level. Four of them angled sharply upwards, too steep to climb, and one curved quickly almost vertically downward, like a well. He selected one of the remaining three that extended more or less horizontally to the south, and followed it. After several hours walking he'd travelled deeper towards the heart of the City than he felt he could have done by a parallel path on the outside. Slender skypunchers were densely packed around the tube which curved between them, or else around them or through them as if the form of the tubes and the towers had each been designed to accommodate the other. It should have been dark here, but the buildings parted in the sky or reflected the sunlight in just the right way to illuminate long sections. The path had branched at several points, but he'd followed as straight a track as he could at each junction to avoid confusion on the way back. There were also places where the City outside penetrated through the wall of the tube - not accidentally but by design, always maintaining a full and tight seal. These penetrations took the form of circular or rectangular fields of fine wires, sometimes studded with tiny lights that flashed in waves and spirals like some kind of gaudy party decoration, sometimes vibrating in a way that tickled and caressed the palm of his hand when he touched them. There was even one that sprayed fine mists of water through nozzles connected to pipes on the outside, fogging up the clear surface and dripping down to form little puddles on the floor.

The path came to a tee junction, continuing horizontally to the left and right. He was tempted to explore further - walking the springy surface of the tube was easy and the mask now so natural he was barely conscious of having it on - but the noon eclipse had already passed and he did not relish spending the night here. In any case he had seen enough. As he started back towards the hub he tried to piece together the strands of evidence that had been accumulating in the months in the City and the years before that. Suspicions that had begun first with the discovery of the Jimitry back east and further validated at the Nest, populated with exotic life, had now become so compelling that speculation was unavoidable and the subtle divide between potential explanation and actual knowledge almost crossed. Though there was still much about his situation and his purpose in it that was mysterious, a good deal of it was now starting to fit. An alien habitat, occasionally populated with alien life, with alien air that he now had the means to breathe, and an alien world suspended in the sky, beckoning, with a loaded cannon pointing directly at it. He knew the direction in which his life was being nudged, and he was not sure he was comfortable with it.

-Day 3673

"Friday, March 13, 10: Evening. Tonight, with luck, another mystery falls."

He had been waiting patiently for this day for some time. It might have arrived sooner but for the annoyingly persistent cloud cover of the past week. That had now cleared completely, so after sunset he took the monorail to Station Ten and walked the skyway, under the light of Lune's waxing face, to the Observatory.

When midnight was only minutes away and the sky almost at its darkest he turned on the green marker spot, which was now located in the wide clear sky to the east of Lune's now darkened disk, and ramped up the instrument's light sensitivity to maximum. The purple vestiges of the penumbral shadow gained even greater prominence, as did the flashes of lightning from a major storm front along the north east corner of the face, and a handful of stars and nebulae became clearly visible across the rest of the sky. None of these things became bright enough or numerous enough to be distracting as he focussed attention on the region indicated by the marker. He had tried to resist the temptation to guess at what he might find there, but a few thoughts kept intruding anyway, and if he was honest what he saw was the most prominent of them - and the one he had hoped for.

The marker spot rested on a small but well defined elongated patch of white in the blackness of the night. There was another very similar one nearby, so close that at mid magnification both could be seen with some detail in the same view. The second he recognised immediately. It was the iconic image of a galaxy that he had seen countless times either directly through other telescopes or in photographs, starting when he was a lad with no more than a passing interest in astronomy. Specifically it was the Andromeda galaxy. He could still recall the statistics as if ingrained by rote - the closest big galaxy at a distance of two million light-years - though those facts were no longer relevant. Or even true.

The first, with the marker point like a bright green star just off centre, was almost its twin in nearly every way. It was similar in size and shape, even parallel in its orientation, right down to the two smudgy satellites hovering nearby. He recognised this one as well, pulling the image from the recesses of his mind. But that knowledge was not spread over his whole life. Rather it was confined to one small section of it, and not from photographs or observations, but only from simulations derived from models, accurate though they now seemed to have been. In fact he was poignantly, painfully aware that very probably he was the only human being who had ever seen this sight as a real thing.

This was the Milky Way, the galaxy of his birth \- his original home - seen from the outside.

For several minutes he stood transfixed on the view he was looking at. For all its emotional impact the scene was not unexpected. Indeed it was direct confirmation - the first he had been given in the ten years since his arrival - that he was where he was supposed to be. He had been told to expect exactly this sight - indeed it was one of very few things he had been told to expect. The only things anyone had been able to predict he would find, if he arrived safely at his planned destination, were the simple knowledge that he had survived the trip, and the view back.

Pushing the magnification to its top setting he drew the Milky Way as close to himself as he could. The green marker spot, until he turned it off, indicated a location about half way between the centre of the galaxy and its outer edge along the long axis. He could make out no more detail other than a few dark dust lanes. Even at that magnification stars were merged together into a hazy mist. But he was sure the makers of this instrument had matched the precise point of that marker with the orrery he could access at the turn of a key. Certainly they would have been provided with the information needed to pinpoint humanity's home star, albeit in a gesture of little other than historic significance. And no doubt they would, somewhere, possess far more powerful instruments - powerful enough to resolve that star and the planets surrounding it, and match it up with whatever introductory information they had been sent. Of course any information that had been received was, as a matter of physical necessity, already thirteen million years out of date. The image he was observing at that moment was part of what he had carried here with him, like his own memories of the past. It was nothing more than an afterglow, an archival record showing the historic backdrop of whatever reality now existed. Somewhere in that image, though at a level of detail inaccessible to this or any other conceivable telescope, were the faces of people he had known - or maybe their grandchildren or great-great-grandchildren depending on factors of his own story still unknown - playing through like an old home movie. Those people would have been long gone in reality, passed into history, and then into prehistory, and then even from that - all but forgotten to everyone except him, just as he was probably now forgotten. The whole Milky Way would have been transformed in ways he could not begin to imagine by thirteen million years of posthuman activity. And if he was ever to return it would have transformed not only by that much, but by that much again.

He pulled back on the magnification just enough for the whole image to be taken in at a glance, and turned on the green pointer again. The spiral arms built from millions of suns, the lanes of dark dust, the bright central bar were all clearly discernible - foreshortened by perspective though they were - and the green spot indicated a ludicrously unremarkable location in the midst of it all. Everything that humanity had ever been existed in that elongated band of white. Everything with the sole exception of himself.

If he had wanted to feel any lonelier than he did right at that moment he would not have known how to do it.

The shadow of NewEarth crept across the face of Lune as the night wore on, and an expanding sliver of bright reflected daylight reduced the contrast between the Milky Way and the dark of the sky around it. Soon the image of his former home became a hazy smudge, and then even that was gone, thrusting him back into the present.

-Day 3790

The day was overcast, as it had been for about a week - an unbroken field of thick, high cloud concealing the whole sky and much of the taller portions of the City. There had been only a little rain and even that seemed now to have passed, so he spent the morning making the best of what he considered pleasant conditions to take a relaxed bicycle ride through a previously underexplored part of the City, starting from Station Thirteen and the Prime Fabricator. When systematic searching had run out of things to find, he had decided, random wandering might just yield fruit.

The bicycle was the perfect vehicle for that, especially in this region where the buildings were sparse and the ground flat. Its current version was the most recent of a series of successful ventures of the past few months. Elegant and functional in design, it was the result of a dim memory of bicycle structure coupled with trial and error and several failed prototypes. It featured a simple V frame with a padded seat, a chainless ratcheting pedal system, solid spokeless wheels and solid tires which he managed to give a good tread and a rigidity matching that of an inflatable inner tube - exactly and only those components and materials he had been able to coax from the Prime Fabricator given limited knowledge of its user interface. Fortunately his memory of how to ride a bike was more robust than his memory of how to build one.

Another achievement of those months had been to scale the outer wall of the City and return to his initial entry point. He had fabricated a sufficient quantity of rope and some simple safety harnesses, then abseiled down at several likely points until he found the alcove that still contained those items he had been forced to abandon there - his Thunderbuss, his axe and other tools and his journals. He counted it as an achievement even though none of those items had been particularly missed or could not have been re-created if needed. A planned project for a later time was to establish easy access to the outside, and even to fabricate the makings of a boat to travel back to the shore, should he ever wish to do so.

He had also spent much time in the Cannon Bunker, familiarising himself with its layout and mechanism, reacquainting himself with the checks and procedures he once knew only too well and, like a child standing on a high diving board, trying to convince himself to take the step he knew was inevitable.

That morning he had put all of those plans aside and was content with little more than idle exploration. He had long ago concluded that most of the buildings in the City were for show only or for purposes he was not expected to understand or use. But he continued to explore previously unseen and trackless regions, mapping them and naming them and trying to construct a model of what this place was and why he was here. Starting at daybreak from Station Thirteen he had, within two hours, penetrated so far into unfamiliar territory that he was becoming concerned he might not easily find the way back. Instead of inducing fear as it might once have done, this sensation had lately produced a kind of exhilaration and a drive to push forward.

He was drawn to one particular building, not because of its unusual shape - the structures comprising the City were unified only by their individual uniqueness - but by the fact it seemed more isolated from it surroundings, standing alone on a wide flat courtyard. It consisted of a slender tapering central column supporting a broad bulbous top. Like a mushroom. Apart from its much larger size and lighter colour it vaguely resembled Eden Tower, the artificial womb in which he had been incubated and from which he had emerged a decade earlier and ten thousand kilometres away. His curiosity was ultimately piqued by the especially elaborate locking mechanism of the entranceway at its base. It was a combination lock similar to that protecting the Observatory, except that each rotating tumbler could display nine distinct settings, differentiated by both colour and shape, and there were seven of them. Over four million combinations, he calculated roughly in his head, far too many to go through systematically or even to try randomly. Worse, there was nothing on the door, or the door frame, or anywhere else he could see that offered a clue. By its nature a combination lock cannot be broken by reason alone. Unlike a slider lock - like the one on the Cannon Bunker - where a specific goal is evident, the solution is arbitrary and must be given, but it could be anywhere or hidden beneath layers of camouflage. The only alternative was to run through all possibilities. Maybe that was the point. Maybe the Hosts were testing his resolve - to see if he was willing to spend the weeks it would potentially take to systematically break the seal by brute force and find out what they were hiding.

He paced around the base of the structure and out across the courtyard to some distance, hoping that some insight to a solution would spontaneously erupt. As he did he let himself wonder if there was a purpose to the trials he was being subjected to. Was he being observed right now, his puzzlement noted and analysed, discussed and critiqued? Was he being assessed for suitability to receive the knowledge held behind this door, or judged more generally for his worthiness to even be here? And if so what was the pass mark? Did he just have to get the door open, or was he being timed? And what happened if he failed?

The distraction worked. It suddenly became clear, with no effort on his part to make it so, that seven of the buildings in the distance to his left, and another seven on the right, had a roughly similar colour scheme and sported similar geometric form to the marked faces on the tumblers, and when viewed from the perspective of just in front of the door the randomly arranged skyscrapers lined up to form a specific sequence. The coincidence was too striking not to be worth a try, and the door to the tower swung open at the first attempt. It made him wonder what other knowledge might lie coded on the otherwise haphazard layout of the City.

Inside, a tightly spiralling staircase ascended into the middle of a single circular room, windowless and dimly lit by numerous small lights that seemed to be providing illumination only incidentally. Around the perimeter of the room were twelve - he counted them twice to be sure - transparent kidney shaped tanks or receptacles about the size of his backpack. Protruding from each at a single point - like large beans germinating from a germ spot - were a series of fine tubes or wires that extended out across the floor and ceiling where they disappeared at various places. It was not immediately apparent whether these were feeding into or out from the tanks or merely there to suspend them above the ground. And in front of each was a control plinth, the only control being a narrow rectangular slot for the insertion of a key. They were all identical and evenly spread, giving the structure a tidy symmetry.

He walked over to one of the tanks and examined it. To the touch it was firm but not hard, like an overinflated cushion. The way it refracted the scene behind suggested it was either solid or filled with clear liquid, but was otherwise empty. His first thoughts went to a specialised fabricator system, or perhaps something related to the Octopus, but unless he could activate the device speculation about its purpose was probably futile. He felt around the base of the control plinth and searched elsewhere as best he could in the dull light, but found nothing that looked like a key. He also tried the orrery key from the Observatory which he carried on his tool belt, but it did not fit. The whole arrangement was vaguely and amusingly suggestive of an ancient monument reconstructed with better materials - like a neolithic stone circle freshly cast in glass and chrome - which might have been used for the performance of some mysterious ritual. With this imagery in mind he named it the Henge, and noted its existence and location in his journal before leaving, still without any idea what it was.

-Day 3877

For reasons he could not quite understand himself the man had not visited the Observatory in months - not since seeing the magnified and enhance view of the Milky Way through its scope. In a similar way he was not really sure what drew him back that morning. Both planets were particularly free of clouds as he travelled the monorail to Station Ten, and without the increased albedo those clouds would normally have provided the day side of Lune was scarcely any brighter than its night side. Even so, in the light of its waning crescent, he could see swathes of the surface across the western part of Grand Australis that were darker even than usual - not the deep dark greens and browns that continent normally displayed, but black as coal. He had seen that sort of discolouration only rarely before, and now, he thought idly, might be an opportunity to view it more closely.

Mostly, though, as he ambled the skyway between Station Ten and the Observatory, he was musing on choices he had made in his life and those he was faced with next. Each time he found himself confronting an important decision his mind would scan back over those previous times that similar decisions had been made and what had resulted from them, as if such recollections of the past constituted prescience about the future that might inform action now, in the present. The choice to make the journey to Ninety Long - to leave the farm and home he had built in the east and trek an unknown wilderness, guided by one mystery and motivated by little other than hope in another - the choice that had brought him here to the City - was simply the most recent of these. Before that the choice that had brought him across intergalactic space to this planet, taken ten thousand millennia ago in the Citadel of Orion, to accept the role of humanity's envoy. And before that to leave his birth world and become a true citizen of the cosmos. All of those had been made possible by a single choice, made at the very dawn of his existence, to have himself cryonically preserved at the moment of death. That had been an act of the utmost audacity \- the kind of thing which, in hindsight, ought not to have been tried, much less succeeded - but because of it he had been able to cheat the fate of all generations prior to his.

The road of life, it seemed, was defined by a series of forks, few in number and far between, interspersed within long stretches of time where the consequences of decisions taken at those points are played out. Success might be measured in many ways, but ultimately any decision that resulted in another one at a later time could be considered a good one. By that standard he - uniquely among his people, perhaps among any people - had scored more successes than any creature had a right to hope for. Yet the fabric of life has a more delicate weave than such broad strokes would suggest, and it is not the major choices, nor those tightly planned or deliberately taken, that matter most. Between each of those major branch points lie thousands of smaller ones, often unnoticed at the time and forgotten afterwards, which really trace the path taken. And all of it is guided not by the will alone - perhaps not by the will at all - but by the circumstances in which the will finds itself.

"Is anything we do truly under our control?" he asked himself as he walked. The question was an echo of a sentiment he had expressed many times over the course of his life. He had asked it once, long ago in the Citadel of Orion - a construction of posthuman technology on a scale that dwarfed even the City he now inhabited - in the final hours leading up to the wilful termination of his existence there. That was, he recalled, in a conversation with the Librarian. The Librarian was a demigod, basically human in form though gigantic in stature, a spokesperson or prophet of sorts, an intermediary between the Overlords who ruled the Citadel and the merely human. It must have been one of the last conversations he'd had with a personage so closely aligned with the divine form of humanity's descendants.

The Librarian and the Citadel of Orion were most probably long gone by now, at least in the form he remembered them, even as he lived on.

"All lives are lived as part of the world that contains them," the Librarian had responded. "That is true of the 'Lords no less than anyone else. We each have a role we are destined to play."

"But how much choice do we have in that destiny, and how much is chosen for us?" the man had pressed the question further. "Is there any real choice at all? We think ourselves free, but we are not the unbounded creatures we believe ourselves to be."

By the time he reached the Observatory the sun was high and bright and so close to the face of Lune that the otherwise prominent satellite was washed away under its glare. So he turned up the telescope's filter until it was comfortable to look at directly, a golden disk in an otherwise featureless black sky, but no less majestic for that. Three tiny blemishes betraying the presence of sunspots, like holes chipped into its surface, were the only features that marred its pristine simplicity and gave it any texture at all. He waited and watched as one rounded edge flattened perceptibly against an invisible barrier marking the start of the eclipse. He waited the minute it took the expanding flat edge to slice the disk, chord by chord, into a semicircle, and then the further minute for the semicircle to reduce down to a single golden fleck. It was only when that fleck was entirely gone that he pushed the filter back to its default setting and took in the view once more, as it were, with his own eyes.

He noticed at once the fine crimson ribbon that meandered like a glowing red river across the western hemisphere of Lune's otherwise familiar darkened face. He had only seen this before on one other occasion - on his journey west across the Great Continent, at a time when the futility and meaninglessness of his life and labours was weighing heavily on his soul. As it was beginning to do again. At that time the appearance of just one more mystery, even one as simple as a faint red line on another world, had been enough to lift him out of that depression and renew his sense of purpose. There was a risk that gaining any deeper insight into that mystery could spoil the effect, but curiosity proved the stronger drive and he focused the scope onto one section of glowing thread, ramping its magnification to maximum.

An explanation for the phenomenon presented itself almost immediately. The dull red line resolved itself into wave after wave of lashing flame and billowing smoke, marking a thick boundary between the dark green of the land before it and blackened ash behind. A fire front, raging slowly across vast tracts of lunar landscape like a smouldering ember. He could appreciate this as a scene of ferocious devastation, even from so comfortable a lookout. He had not witnessed fire on anything approaching this scale since he was a child living on Earth, where it was an occasional if much feared feature of life in a dry land. Everywhere else he had lived in the subsequent centuries fire had been either well contained or not needed at all. Yet seeing it now in its full destructive glory from the safety of distance gave it a much deeper and much more benign significance. It appeared to him like an old friend, if anything making that world seem more normal, oddly welcoming and offering one final and timely clue to a question that had been playing on his mind for weeks. Far from being a thing to fear, that fire was one more link in the bridge between birth and destiny, a bridge that a fragile creature like him might be able to cross. In that moment a decision crystallised in his mind above the sea of uncertainty. He knew what he had to do, and though the doubts would continue until the deed was done, the resolution brought with it a relief that helped cement the choice like a contract.

He sat on the floor and watched the fire raging above him through the image in the scope, contemplating the choice he had made as if hoping someone might come by to provide assurance of its rightness, or else to talk him out of it. He pulled back on the magnification of Lune's image until its whole face floated above him, larger than it would naturally appear, and pressed the button to activate the green pointer. It marked a fuzzy smudge in the darkened sky just off the western rim of Lune's night facing disk, which was in the direction of his own eastern horizon. Then he zoomed in so the smudge once more appeared as the foreshortened spiral form of the Milky Way before him, held up in sharp relief with the wall of flame as it curved around the edge of the planet. A single view capturing the contrast between his own past, distant now in space and time, with one possible future.

"The only way to truly understand our boundaries," the Librarian had offered as their time together drew to an end, "is to move beyond them."

"Can the human soul outreach its limits without becoming something more than human?" the man had enquired. "Isn't that what the Overlords reveal to us by their very existence as they spread themselves among the stars?"

"That is indeed the great paradox of being," the Librarian laughed. "The effort we must expend, the trials we must endure, the multitude of changes we must make in our lives, simply to stay the way we are. You above all people, Ancient, you who have remained the same through countless ages, you know this better than most."

As he watched the Milky Way slip behind Lune's curved horizon the sky around it began to brighten marking the emergence of the sun from the opposite side and the end of the eclipse. In those last seconds before the return of daylight he was struck by the profound mismatch in the apprehension of scale that single view imposed over his mind - a solitary star whose bright magnificence easily outshone tens of billions of others, each its like in every way except for being as common as grains of sand on a beach, including the one that had given birth to himself and his entire kind. From childhood he had known that the universe was vast beyond comprehension, and since that childhood his own personal perspective had expanded so far that he often felt it was on the verge of snapping like an overstretched rubber band.

"So small and fragile a creature," he mused, "to be born so helpless and live so lost in the face of all things."

The Librarian's final words came to his memory in reply, pertinent as ever even here. "Small and fragile we may be, yet without us nothing else has a point."

-Day 3892

"Sunday, October 22, 10: Morning. I have done everything I can to prepare. There is nothing left but to take the step."

He thought for a moment about that comment. Was it really true?

By any standards of normal human behaviour what he was about to do, what he had been contemplating for months, would have been insane - not to mention terrifying. He was to immerse himself totally in a fluid, inside a sphere of dimensions just sufficient to contain him in the foetal position. The oxygen saturated fluid would replace the air in every otherwise air filled cavity of his body, including his lungs. Though he would not die, his evolutionary history as an air breathing mammal would force him to endure all the horror and panic associated with drowning. The sphere would then be sealed shut with him inside and fired - under an acceleration which would, but for the support of the fluid surrounding him, be instantly fatal - into the vacuum of space. Oddly enough, this first part of the process was not his biggest concern. He had already reacquainted his body and mind with the processes and physiology of liquid breathing over the past weeks by sitting submerged in the tank for longer and longer periods - up to several hours a few days prior. In any case he had done it all before - many times. Cannonballing was a popular sport back in the day, and occasionally even a practical means of getting around. That was long ago, but it was one of those things which, once tried, was not easily forgotten.

No, it was what happened after that, the part he didn't know about, that worried him.

He had completed all the mandatory preparations \- restricted diet for a week followed by twenty four hours fasting to purge the stomach and bowels of anything that might produce gas, meditation and breathing exercises and exercises to open the airways of the ears and sinuses. Depending on parameters outside of his knowledge or control even a small air bubble might be uncomfortable, or debilitating, or even lethal. The issue of what to take also required some thought. At various points he had considered taking so many tools, journals, food rations and other goods and chattels that there would be no room for himself in the small capsule. Gradually he had whittled it down to a few essentials - a single breathing mask, enough food and water to break his fast on arrival, and his utility belt. He had to have faith that, as he'd been so clearly invited to go, his survival on arrival would be catered for - though he was well aware that from this point on virtually everything he did was a mortal gamble. Even Thunderbuss, initially seen as a necessary precaution, proved too bulky an item to fit - and arriving with a weapon might be thought ... undiplomatic.

So it was that in the hour before sunrise he entered the Cannon Bunker and, with only the briefest additional hesitation, climbed into the tank and squeezed through the narrow opening into the cannonball. He forced himself to inhale the liquid, stoically tolerating the stinging pain as it flooded the dry air sacs of his lungs, the involuntary convulsions, the strong gag reflex and waves of intense nausea. He waited patiently for the few minutes it took for these symptoms to subside. He took several deep breaths, consciously inhaling and exhaling as fully as he could until the last bubbles trickled from his nose and mouth, aware of the additional effort breathing now required. He gulped a few mouthfuls of the fluid to displace the air in his stomach which he burped up as a further stream of bubbles, careful not to drink too much or too quickly. He still needed to breathe and could still choke. Then he waited until he felt the closest approximation to normal to be expected for a while - and continued to wait. He was beginning to wonder if he had misjudged or misremembered the sequence of events that should be taking place. He thought back to the last time he had undergone this process, the immediacy of the current circumstance prompting more detailed recollection. That had been on Aurigae where cannonballing was seen as an efficient, if somewhat daring, means of travel between those habitats that were not directly connected, and must have been almost a hundred and fifty years ago even by the subjective reckoning of his own consciousness. Even as the sequence was being called to mind it began, as if on cue, to take place in real time. First the capsule was pulled deeper into the tank and rotated by forces out of his control, then the top cap was pushed on and locked into place with a sharp click, and finally the now fully enclosed cannonball was inserted into the breech.

It was dark in there, pitch dark apart from a blurry patch of white light at some indeterminable distance down the barrel. He suppressed the growing claustrophobia and tried to calm the heartbeat that was thumping in is ears through the liquid medium. His recollection went, unbidden, from the last time he'd made a cannonball run on Aurigae, to the very first time. That was from Earth - a brief, suborbital hop that was meant for no purpose other than fun. Fun, he thought - the very absurdity of the idea helping to relieve the tension. He could not remember what had motivated him to take that first trip - someone had talked him into it, proven its safety, convinced him it would be a good thing to try - but he couldn't remember who or when or how. Still less could he remember what had motivated him to take the second trip. What he did remember was the degree to which the process had traumatised him initially - seriously and genuinely traumatised. He'd felt sick for days afterwards, and it induced a fear of drowning that lasted for years, and was perhaps at least partly responsible for the claustrophobia that plagued him for the rest of his life - right up to that moment. It was decades before he had been able to try it again, and each successive run had become easier until he was almost used to it. Almost.

Nothing so far was other than what experience suggested he should expect. He could hear the muffled sounds of the pumps evacuating the barrel, the distant hum of capacitors charging and the mechanical thuds and clicks of the capsule being positioned in its sabot for what was to come. He waited, staring at the single blurry light in front of him. That light was just an incidental part of the electromagnetic rail system powering the cannon - a mechanism not dissimilar to his own Thunderbuss - and not there for the benefit of him or anyone else. But he could use it. The amount of its blurriness shifted as fluid was pumped from the barrel leaving only what he was floating in and the transparent side of the cannonball. With an effort he was able to adjust the focus of his eyes against the fluid and bring the light into sharp relief - a trick he had learnt on previous cannonball runs and had evidently not forgotten. The ambient sounds faded into a moment of silence.

Suddenly the light was gone. There was no real sense of motion, but his clothing and tool belt began to creep across his skin as if they had come alive and were trying to escape from him. Another light flashed past, then another and another in rapidly increasing succession, with each one a faint mechanical click that merged into a continuous hum. A tiny spot of faint blue light appeared ahead - within a fraction of a second it had expanded to surround him.

He was free.

In front loomed the familiar view of Lune in its half phase. Behind, the vast conical expanse of the City Core, still grey with pre-dawn shadow, retreated even as he watched it to reveal ever more of the surrounding ocean and landscape. The surface of NewEarth perceptibly curved round into a crimson horizon from which the bright morning sun suddenly burst in a vastly accelerated sunrise. Within seconds the sky around the sun faded from deep blue to jet black, and the atmosphere became a layer of blue haze hugging the receding horizon. The sun itself was a ball of white, brilliant but not painful to look at even directly - a consequence of the artificially selective filtering of the cannonball surface, protecting his fragile body from the extremes of space while allowing its beauty into his senses. What had felt only moments ago like a frenetic escape had now slowed to a leisurely crawl. The City had reduced to a minor circular blemish, devoid of all but its most prominent details, on a slowly contracting landscape.

His hands and body were still blurred like a ghostly astral form and the capsule surrounding him was completely invisible, but everything outside was crystal clear. The effect was a startling impression of being suspended in the vastness of space entirely without protection. NewEarth was no longer an environment in which he lived, but just another object in a universe containing only four things - two planets, the sun and himself - all equal in the eternal void. Everything was still save for the last vestige of motion from his retreating home, and silent save for the faint throbbing of his heart - barely perceptible between audible and visceral.

Now he remembered why he'd made the second cannonball flight.

The direct sense of motion had ceased entirely and the only way he could tell that anything was moving at all was by consciously comparing, over the course of many minutes, subtle changes in relative size and position of the bodies around him. As more of the face of NewEarth came into daylight he could take in old knowledge from a new perspective, as well as see new details unavailable when he was living among them. He could see the City lying just off shore from the end of a long continent that extended past the eastern horizon. Along those parts of the Great Continent that were not hidden behind cloud he could make out tracts of desert and forest, mountain ranges and lakes that he had passed by or passed through on his long trek. To the west of the City was a stretch of open blue ocean broken only here and there by collections of small islands. He also noticed that he was seeing more of the surface to the west of the City than to the east. North and south were groups of larger islands or smaller continents, and at the extreme edge of the face he could make out the white rimmed borders marking what were possibly the planet's polar regions. From this perspective, too, he could see clearly the similarities and distinctiveness of the twin worlds. Beneath the clouds NewEarth was predominantly blue, due mainly to the preponderance of ocean surface to land surface - a trait which, as he had only recently been reminded, it shared with its eponym. Nor was this likely to be a coincidence, he thought.

Lune, on the other hand - increasingly now showing its night side - was mostly black, by contrast rather dismal and uninviting, he thought, echoing an opinion he had noted often before. Beyond that it was now more evident that the two planets were roughly the same size, notwithstanding the shifting perspective as his journey between them continued. And each carried a Small Brown Spot - though one was now only faintly visible in doubly reflected light - matching structures marking their closest point. He noticed, almost incidentally, that those spots were each disconcertingly off centre. Moreover he noticed that he could see both worlds now in a single view, barely turning his head to apprehend each huge orb in its entirety. On the assumption that the corresponding City on Lune was his intended destination - and he was well aware it was an assumption only - then he was badly off course. What was worse, his motion between the worlds seemed to have stalled. The only discernible movement for over an hour was that of the sun, which was now on the verge of passing into eclipse behind Lune. The deviation from expected course did not concern him greatly - he knew from long experience that ballistic trajectories were notoriously counter-intuitive. What was more worrying was that oxygen saturating the liquid in this small capsule would not last if this sojourn continued for very much longer.

He allowed his mind to wander back to the many other times he had taken a freespace path between planets or moons or artificial habitats of one sort or another, either in a cannonball such as this one, or a ferry or a leisurely cruiser or a tethered space elevator. There had been many such occasions, but none for a long time. The last must have been a hundred years ago, around the Citadel of Orion, a burgeoning, bustling hive of orbital activity amid the light of a thousand suns. It made him think what a strange rollercoaster his life had become, ranging almost seamlessly from the most incredible technology to the most primitive of lifestyles and now back again, from living among transhuman demigods to now complete isolation, passing from the summit of human experience to its lowest depths of despair.

With the sun gone and the twinned worlds vanished against a starless veil of black he became aware that his universe had shrunk to almost nothing. He had once asked himself whether it was possible to feel more lonely - more lonely than to stand in the middle of a vast salt plain and listen as his cries went unanswered even by their own echo; more lonely than to stare at the entire galaxy in which his race was born from a distance of thirteen million light-years; more lonely than to realise he was the only human being even a fraction of that distance from home; more lonely than to contemplate the possibility he might be the last human being in existence. Now, adrift in the silent void of space, every material object in the universe gone from sight, he had his answer.

Over the course of the next hour NewEarth emerged from the shadow of the eclipse and he could see that the small blemish at the edge of the Great Continent that marked the City was moving once more to the centre of its face. Only by its third hand light could he see Lune as a grey ghostly disk. In a mirror image of his outward trajectory he could feel himself lining up for approach to that dark face which was looming ever larger in his field of view. He could now see only one world at a time, and only by reorienting himself by a full one eighty degrees. His head was starting to ache, a sign of reduced oxygen and increased toxins in his little bubble of life support. In the dim doubly reflected light he could see the conical peak of his destination surrounded by a swirling mass of storm clouds beneath it, punctuated by occasional flashes of lightning. He was arriving into a major storm. The dark curve at the edge of the planet's disk was rapidly rising and expanding, creating the illusion that his speed was increasing. Now the view in front of the cannonball started glowing with a dull orange light and a faint stream of vapour seemed to pour out from its sides, extending behind him like the tail of a comet. Inside the temperature was rising rapidly and noticeably.

He trusted that the cannonball was designed to handle reentry, he knew its trajectory across the gulf separating the two worlds had been calculated to the fraction of a millimetre, but in those last few seconds he was not able to suppress the additional knowledge of all the things that even the most competent of engineers might not be able to prevent. He might still be boiled alive, or an unexpected gust of wind in the upper atmosphere could push it far enough off course to send it crashing into solid ground.

These apprehensions lasted barely long enough for them to become true fears. Within seconds a small black point at the very apex expanded and engulfed him. Sound amplified from the faintest hiss to a roar that shook him to the bone. He could see nothing except rapid flashes of light that seem to be coming at him from all directions, like fast moving fireflies. The intensity of the sound and the pace of the lights diminished until all that was left was a vague red blur and a ringing in his ears. He could feel the inside wall of the cannonball. It was spinning. No - that was wrong. It had been spinning, probably set tumbling during re-entry. Though he felt only the faintest dizziness, it was him that was spinning inside it, like a well shaken snow globe. He braced himself hard against the side until the motion stopped. No sooner had it stopped before there was a loud, protracted crack that he felt just as much as he heard. The capsule split open across its midline like an egg, spilling him onto the floor in a minor flood of liquid.

"Nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do." (Gen 11:6)

-Day 3893

He raised himself up on his hands and knees, struggling to remain balanced against the violent spinning that he could still feel in his head, and vomited the fluid from his lungs and stomach in a second gushing flood. He remained there for another minute, coughing and retching and waiting for the dizziness to dissipate before sitting in the puddle and deeply inhaling dry air once more. Only then did he remember that this might not be proper air at all. He quickly grabbed the mask and put it over his mouth and nose but found, to his surprise and not inconsiderable concern, that breathing through it was quite difficult. His first thought was that perhaps the better part of seven hours immersed in the fluid of the cannonball had rendered it nearly useless. Then another thought occurred. He pulled the mask off and waited - several minutes - then several minutes more. Nothing. He felt, more or less, fine. He was breathing normal air after all. A number of explanations flashed into his mind, but the most likely seemed to be that he had been deposited in an environment designed for his kind of life.

He stood up, aware as he did that his weight was not noticeably different from what it had been on NewEarth. The planets were, to within the tolerances of his perception of gravity, the same - at least in that respect. He looked around. It was dark there, but not so dark that he could see nothing. He was standing near the wall of a large circular room, lit around its perimeter by a small number of dim red lights that flickered with annoying irregularity, as if they were constantly shorting out. The remains of the cannonball shell sat on either side in two rough halves, some sections pitted and charred on their outer layers as if hit by a blowtorch. Along the wall four tunnels stretched away from the chamber. One was squat and circular and quickly curled upwards - he assumed that was where the cannonball had come in. The other three were wide enough to comfortably walk, and extended horizontally until they vanished into the darkness.

By his estimates it was the small hours of the morning, local time. He shook the excess of fluid from a portion of the dried fruit he was carrying and nibbled on it as he walked around the edge of the room. It had been days since he'd eaten anything substantial at all, and though he didn't feel particularly hungry he realised that, now if ever, he was going to need his strength. Along the corridors he could see occasional flashes of white light followed seconds later by a reverberating peal of thunder from the raging storm outside. Wherever he was his isolation from the wider environment of this planet was not total - not total enough to block completely the wilds of the weather. The primal fear of dark places welled up inside him, and in his mind he knew that in this instance - having arrived on an alien world in the middle of the night in a thunderstorm - that fear might have a rational justification. He decided it would be best to sit quietly and wait for the light of morning before starting the exploration of this world.

When morning came the room became lit, somewhat more comfortably though still not fully, by diffuse light coming through three of the four corridors. Of these, two were straight and long, vanishing by perspective into the distance beyond the limits of his vision. The other was shorter, and he could see it open out into another room at the far end. All three were punctuated at regular intervals by elliptical port holes which served as the only source of light. He started down the short corridor. The windows were set too high in the wall - just above head height - to get a good look through to the outside, but he could make out a fairly ordinary looking overcast sky, broad areas of white flecked with dark grey. The windows themselves bulged inwards forming transparent elongated domes against the wall.

The room at the far end contained the familiar accoutrements of the cannon bunker on NewEarth - the fluid tank hard up against one wall, constantly overflowing with breathable fluid that gushed from overhead piping and spilled into a drain on the floor, holding a transparent cannonball ready to be launched. That, at least, provided a comforting answer to one of the questions that had quietly been vexing him even before he had chosen to journey here. A second long corridor stretched to no visible terminus in the distance. There were no other doors or windows in the bunker. With few other options available at that point he started to walk along the tunnel.

He was still walking six hours later, by his estimation, when the light filtering through the windows faded to darkness. Long before that the tapering perspective in both directions had become identical, vanishing both ahead and behind and placing him in the middle of what might, to all appearances, have been an infinite linear path. Caution was needed to avoid disorienting himself and losing the intended direction of travel, and he several times used the Quill he carried in his tool belt to mark the otherwise unmarked white walls with arrows pointing behind and the word "Bunker", or ahead with a question mark. Indeed he was starting to wonder if anything was within reasonable walking distance in the forward direction. More importantly the meagre supplies of food and water he had brought with him would not last, and he had started the mental calculation of when he would need to turn back so that the cannonball run to NewEarth could be made before he died of thirst.

It was not long after the noon eclipse had finished when, almost as if cued by these thoughts, the tunnel ahead provided a solution to that particular problem. Not an endpoint so much as a change in the decor of the tunnel. A thin but steady stream of water flowed from a pipe in the ceiling onto the floor where it ran like a river for a short distance before disappearing down a drain, and from the walls grew an assortment of fruits in a manner reminiscent of the food markets on NewEarth. The walls were also furnished with receptacles that would make comfortable places to sleep. It appeared his Hosts were still catering to his basic survival needs, even here, and in so doing pointing him in the proper direction.

He ate and drank to his satisfaction and rested briefly before continuing, taking as much of the food as he could comfortably carry. While it might have been assumed this was not the only such rest stop, nothing could be taken for granted. Rain continued to pelt at the windows as he walked on, and the muffled howl of the storm outside was all he could hear over the sound of his own footsteps. Though the tunnel was wide and flat and the walking was easy, its length and monotony were starting to tell on him - not the labyrinthine and claustrophobic subterranean network of Kruger, this place was stifling in its simplicity. It reminded him more of the interconnected caverns of Orion in the centuries before it had been transformed into a Citadel, when it was still a nearly pristine planet hosting a few nascent zones of terrestrial habitability. Even down to the storm raging continuously outside it reminded him of that place. He had lived in those caverns with their skydomes exposing the violent, turbulent and poisonous natural air of the Orion colony world for the better part of a century, and never once had he seen those storms cease even for a moment.

He had not been alone there as he was here. There he'd had associates and mentors and friends, some human, some more than human - whose advice and support, to say nothing of simple company, would have been more than welcome here. It felt particularly appropriate that his life in the habitats of Orion should be called to mind at that moment. It had been there that the knowledge of a race of beings not descended from humanity was first revealed to him. For all of history prior to that discovery, human beings, for all they knew with any certainty, might very well have been alone in the cosmos. Indeed, prior to that, life of any sort might have been thought unique to Earth or to those places contaminated by explorers originating on Earth, and that despite hundreds of worlds having been reached and examined. Such is the rarity with which the miracle of life spontaneously brings itself into being. But somewhere in the interval between falling asleep in his home on Aurigae and waking up in a new home on Orion, life had been found and confirmed. Not once, but several times. Of course there had been ample time for it - that interval had spanned tens of millennia and in that time the children of humanity had increased their dominion of the Milky Way by many thousandfold. That news had reached him only later as it criss crossed the expanding bubble of human occupation at the snail's pace of light speed. Most noteworthy of all were the signs, so faint across the great gulf of intergalactic space that they could be discerned at all only by vast instruments, and even then only at the limits of resolution of those instruments, of activity by an intelligence on par with that of humanity in a galaxy some thirteen million light-years distant. In spite of their weakness it had been demonstrated beyond any reasonable expression of doubt that intelligent activity was the cause of those signs. He could still recall hearing the news for the first time, the discussions with his companions in the caverns of Orion who had become casual experts in its interpretation, the mind numbing technical arguments by which those interpretations had been confirmed over the course of centuries of analysis. He could still, even after all the intervening time, put names and occasional faces to some of those companions - Fritz-Biscane who was thin and wiry and understood exo-biochemistry and abiogenesis, and Tulley, exactly the opposite in appearance who had studied the evolutionary history of both terrestrial and non-terrestrial life. Not professionally, of course. The professional investigation of any topic did not exist as a part of any human colony. There were others whose appearance was less clear in his mind and whose names he had forgotten entirely.

He recalled the discovery of intelligence originating somewhere other than Earth as a genuinely fascinating truth, yet nonetheless entirely tangential to his life at the time. And he recalled the disappointment in the conclusion that, other than the indubitable fact of their existence, literally nothing at all was known about the race of beings inhabiting that distant galaxy. He could not have guessed at that time the turn his life was to take, that the existence of a second intelligent race would become anything but tangential, that he himself would be fated with crossing the intergalactic gulf and meeting them face to face.

He was here now, poised to fulfil that destiny, having taken all the steps save the final few. And he knew not a single thing more about them than he had known at the start.

It was after sundown and the way visible only by diffuse light of NewEarth filtering through the clouds and windows before he came to another respite. He slacked his thirst and soaked his face with the stream of water running from the ceiling before collapsing into an alcove and falling asleep.

-Day 3894

Feeling only marginally refreshed he continued trekking as soon as the first light of day appeared through the windows. The storm had abated in the night, but the only colour he could see outside was the white of the cloud and the grey of a polished high exterior wall. The windows, though numerous, remained annoyingly difficult to access. Their inward bulge and high elevation defeated any attempt to gain purchase on the sill and hoist himself up to see the outside more clearly. So his attention was on the diffuse pools made by the light filtering in from above and illuminating the floor at his feet. But those pools had become oddly mottled, waves of light and shade rippling around them in a mass of moving halos. It took a moment before this effect registered in his consciousness and he thought to look up to see what might be causing it. The windows were alive with innumerable insects on their outer surface, not so many as to obscure the light completely nor arranged so haphazardly as to block it randomly. He could see immediately that they were the same kind of creatures he had found occupying the Nest, in the great desert back on NewEarth \- wasps, he had called them - but now he was caged and they were free. He knew that symmetry was consistent with his growing expectations. They belonged here. Just as he belonged on NewEarth, they belonged here.

He stood and watched them for a time, watched as each one individually danced briefly and jostled with its neighbours before flying off, to be replaced by another which did almost exactly the same thing. The pattern as a whole varied only slowly until he walked on, when it changed with every step as if following his movement. For the next several hours the swarm came and went, occasionally dwindling to only a few insects or dissipating altogether before returning again and continuing the same curious behaviour.

It was mid-morning when, at long last, the windows and the corridor ended in a windowless and dimly lit chamber whose form and function - with its arrangement of tanks, circular base plate and single control console - he recognised as a fabricator. Two long tunnels led away in different directions in addition to the one he had come in on. The fabricator controls were similar, but not identical, to those he had worked with back home, and he spent the rest of the morning and well into the afternoon checking and testing its capabilities. Home, he thought as he did. How easy it is to connect to a place or a thing, to claim possession of it, to call it your own. Once he had familiarised himself with this room and the device it contained - the existence of which had been entirely unknown to him only hours earlier - it too would become home to him, and what lay at the end of the two corridors as deeply mysterious as anything could be. It was the story of his life, perhaps the story of all life.

As it turned out this fabricator had a limited range of stock designs - boots and other clothing articles, rope, a breathing mask identical to the one he had brought with him, blank journals with Quill and ink. No weapons, he noted. No Thunderbuss, or sharp tools, not even a replacement for IceNeedle. It did seem to have enough flexibility to construct simple bespoke patterns. He might have been able to force a simple blade if he needed to, but he had IceNeedle, so he didn't need to. He considered the items he was most likely to want as a test of the machine's operation, and by nightfall had set it to work on the fabrication of a small supply of journals and a pack to carry them in. Then he went to sleep on the floor as they slowly took shape on the pad nearby.

-Day 3896

"Thursday, October 26, 10: Afternoon. I have reached another possible point of interest ..."

For two days and two nights he had intermittently walked, rested, and updated his newly minted journal with current progress and first impressions of this planet - not, he noted, that there was very much to tell. That section of corridor felt particularly monotonous, a long straight path broken only once by a food source and rest stop. Now, at last, there was a modest change of scenery, and he paused to make a journal entry before investigating it further. As he wrote the date he realised that his calendar would here be half a day out one way or the other, but he chose to ignore that minor inaccuracy other than to make a passing note of it.

He was in a small room - really just a Y junction, illuminated by little more than the ambient afternoon light streaming through the windows down each of its arms. Intriguingly, however, there was a fourth branch here as well - a ladder standing embedded in the floor and extending through the low ceiling into blackness above. Leaving his pack at its foot he climbed the ladder, feeling his way up the rungs and hoping the vertical passages of this system were not as long as the horizontal ones. His limbs were beginning to ache from the climb, and the base of the ladder just a small circle of grey light surrounded by darkness, when he emerged onto a landing next to a plinth, visible only by the meagre light of the control panel it supported. It was identical to the control panel of the Observatory back in his own City. Excited by the find he manipulated the buttons and sliders in the way he was familiar with, and within seconds found himself, to all appearances and for the first time, standing under the open sky of this new world.

The platform he was on appeared wide and circular with the control plinth, the ladder exit and himself close to its centre. The sky was shrouded in high white cloud, dimmed in the late afternoon. Much of it to one side was blocked by an immense brown mass which spread over half the horizon and vertically half way to the zenith. This, he could readily judge from its overall size and shape, corresponded to the City, but in its detail it lacked the clearly artificial spires of crystal and metal - less a city and more a monolithic conical mountain. Streams of water, which must have been torrents close up, flowed down its sides. The half of the horizon not blocked by this structure was blocked by the edges of the platform, and he was disappointed that even now he was not seeing more of Lune's natural landscape. He could see, here and there, what appeared to be the forested tops of hills in the distance, but even under the full magnification of the telescope they were hazy and lacking definition, as if shrouded in light mist.

Night fell and the scene was bathed in the soft light of NewEarth diffused through the clouds. He activated the control which, in the telescope's twin back home, had indicated the location of the Milky Way in the sky. A green point of light appeared high above the edge of the platform, but there was nothing to see there except overcast sky. Nevertheless he was encouraged by the similarity between the two sets of controls and searched the base of the control stand for the orrery key. Nothing there. Then he remembered he still had his own key. He had made a place for it on his tool belt in the hope it might fit other locks he found as he explored the City. It hadn't, but he had almost absent mindedly carried it here with him. To his surprise and delight it did fit here.

The image of the night outside disappeared and was replaced by that of a glowing stellar orb floating just above his head. In the distance a number of smaller points of light were clearly indicated as places of interest. He adjusted the controls in the way he anticipated would have the desired effect and the whole system shrank to more manageable dimensions, and reoriented itself to a plan view in front of him. A single central star and four planets. He pulled the image in for a closer look at each of those planets. The outermost one looked at first more like a flattened disk than a planet, even as he walked around the image suspended before him. There was a planet at the centre, small in comparison with the system of rings that orbited and dominated the space around it - an upsized Saturn. The next one was a multicoloured orb of swirling gas. It too had rings, though smaller than its neighbour, and a multitude of pointlike moons that orbited like fireflies. The next was a white sphere that looked like nothing so much as a featureless cue ball. The innermost world had two smallish moons and a variegated white on black surface. The system, unsurprisingly, was not one he had any familiarity with, and in particular it was clearly not the one he now occupied. None of its planets were twin worlds waltzing around each other in a close dance. But this inner world did, at least in broad strokes, resemble Lune as it appeared from space, and he had little doubt what he was being shown in this model.

-Day 3899

"Sunday, October 29, 10: Morning. Today I take another small step for myself, and another giant leap for my kind."

The allusion to one of the most momentous events in the history of humanity was conscious and deliberate, and the significance of its application here was not by any means lost on him. He had been only a child at the time of that incident and his memory of it was almost entirely due to the cultural and historic consequences that flowed from it. How ironic then that he himself, on every level, had surpassed that achievement, and had done so many times over. Yet the vast majority of his peers did not know he had ever existed. What he was about to do was the culmination of that life, and he was doing it alone.

The Observatory had given him a fresh if limited perspective on the surrounding landscape, and he had set out from there in the direction he knew would take him away from the Mountain, having made the difficult choice to do one last leg on foot. The alternative was to look for a more convenient mode of transport. He had a plan for that, but it involved retracing his steps back to the fabricator. Moving ahead was to explore new territory, which he was keen to continue doing, and in any event there could be a second fabricator or something better in that direction, he had argued.

The path he took proved just as long and tedious as the others. Early on he had been visited by another swarm of wasps that had watched him - or listened or whatever they did - from outside. He was convinced they possessed some capacity to sense him and, moreover, that he was an object of interest to them. But they had remained only for an hour or so at the start, then they had gone away and not returned. He had walked for almost the entirety of that day, refreshing himself only briefly at each of the intermittent rest stops along the way, and stopping to sleep only when the tunnel darkened once more with the fall of night. Then he repeated the process the following day. This time darkness fell just as the tunnel came to an abrupt dead end.

It ended in a heavy metal hatch operated by a circular turn-handle. Cautiously he had cracked the seal and peeked beyond to confirm his suspicion, in the last of the fading light, that it opened into an ante-chamber with a similar hatch directly opposite. An airlock. He didn't question the assumption that here, at last, was the way outside. And there he remained for the night, sleepless both from anticipation and the absence of soft bedding, judging it wise to wait for daylight before taking the final step.

The airlock antechamber was lit only by a small skylight that would not have afforded any view of the outside even if it was accessible. But by its light he could see that the chamber was littered with what appeared to be small sharpened twigs, small pebbles and other natural looking rubble. He contemplated this only briefly before fitting the breathing mask over his mouth and nose and trying the outer door. There was a brief moment of frustration and several muttered curses when it seemed the hatch was jammed, but brute force prevailed and he was able to break through the unseen obstruction and prise the door open by a crack against the pressure outside. There was an immediate inrush of warm moist air that hit him like a wave, making his ears pop and his eyes water, but he quickly found he was able to breathe more or less comfortably. The smell on the other hand, he thought to himself, would take more getting used to. Even through the mask it assaulted his nostrils. He would have found it difficult to describe had he bothered to try, but it was not at all pleasant - perhaps a combination of rotting fish and raw sewage, with maybe a hint of cinnamon to take the edge off. With the pressures equalised he pulled the door wide open and gingerly took the first step onto an alien surface.

The mix of emotions he felt at that moment he had felt often in the past. He had felt it on Kruger, and on OldEarth, and most recently on NewEarth itself. He had lived on or visited many worlds during his long life and for each of them there had been a first step, the thrill of newness, the acute awareness of being a foreigner in a foreign land. But this time was different from all the others. All those past worlds had been built for him - in a very real sense they belonged to him. This one did not. This world belonged to someone else. Here he really was the alien.

He was standing on an open field of dark green sponge, so dark it was nearly black, that gave only slightly under his feet but otherwise easily supported his weight. Immediately he was reminded of the floor material in the hubs of each of the three pipe habitats he had found on NewEarth, lending further credence to his suspicion as to what those structures were. The spongy ground covering stretched almost unbroken, save for a few outcroppings of dull grey or orange rock, as far as he could see in several directions where it formed rolling hills in the distance to the right. To the left it sloped down until it disappeared beneath a shore of gently lapping waves. The line of the shore extended in front of him into a coast of black topped cliffs and headlands set against a grey sky. The coastline marked the border between the land on one side and an ocean, wide and flat out to the horizon, on the other. But to describe the scene in terms drawn from its terrestrial equivalent was to belie how seriously wrong it looked. Everything about this seascape was strange, even those things that were entirely familiar - the clouds shaped like the columns of an ancient temple, the soft slurping sound of the waves licking the shore, the warm breeze against his face, the pungent smells filtering through his breathing mask. And the colour. The colour was all wrong. The water as far out as he could see, if he assumed it was water, was very dark brown, differentiated from the land only by its overall flatness, the light swell on its surface and its different hue of black. It looked disgusting - polluted, as if in the aftermath of a major chemical spill, or perhaps infected by an outbreak of toxic bacteria - and he needed to consciously remind himself he had no basis on which to judge the natural beauty of this place. For all he knew that was exactly how an ocean was meant to look on this world. Further out to sea huge trees, like sheer vertical islands growing from the ocean surface, only served to add to the thoroughly alien appearance. At least they looked like trees. From his present perspective he could not even tell if they were natural or artificial, or if the distinction even mattered here.

The sky was still mostly overcast, but interspersed among the cylindrical banks of cloud, patches of the most vivid purple suggested it was starting to clear. From the play of light and shade in the clouds he could tell that the morning sun had risen from the direction of the coastline, fixing that as east with north directly out to sea. Behind him, to the west, the most prominent feature of the landscape was the monolithic grey brown cone of the Mountain, misty with distance and partially obscured by cloud or hidden at its base behind the coastal skyline in the foreground. He could still make out enough of it from this vantage to gauge its size and unnatural symmetry, jutting out into the ocean like a peninsular. A long straight ribbon, tapered by perspective into a thin wire that vanished in its direction, marked the outside of the tunnel he had traversed over the previous days - sometimes partially buried by a low hill, sometimes supported by struts to preserve straightness as it bridged a shallow valley. He noticed that the tunnel end and access hatch were covered in what seemed to be a scaffold of thin sticks and twigs. Once again he could not immediately tell whether this had grown there or been placed with purpose by the machinations of mind. It was, he thought, a confusion he may need to get used to.

Here and there small insects hovered in the air like tiny helicopters, apparently oblivious to him - neither approaching nor retreating - unless he put out a hand to touch one whereupon it simply moved to a less reachable location and continued hovering. There were also small creatures moving along the ground like ants which also, and unlike the ants he knew about, did not seem interested in crawling on him.

For all its strangeness, though, most of what he saw could, provisionally at least, be slotted into categories he was familiar with. There were trees and insects, shore and coast, ocean and sky. But on the ridge of the hills in the distance there were three things he could not immediately put a name to. They looked like dark clouds sitting low to the ground, fixed in place but in constant motion - gyrating, pulsating, expanding and contracting. Not smoothly or simply, but neither randomly nor in representation of any object he could identify save for vague abstract ones - spirals and helices coiling and uncoiling like springs, origami artworks folding and unfolding, monocoloured fireworks bursting to two or three times their smallest size before collapsing down to a compact lump. The closest image in his memory that matched this kind of activity were displays of complex mathematical functions on a holographic screen. Even here, even in this thoroughly exotic landscape, they were out of place.

He would have taken a closer look at these strange clouds, except that what he could tell about them was that they were some distance away. Instead he walked down to the water's edge. The spongy black surface of the land sloped under the waves as might sand on a beach. The water, which looked so dirty from a distance, was actually crystal clear, its dark tinge due to it containing a continuous mass of slender strands, like brunette hair that waved to and fro in the currents just beneath the surface. If that was universally the source of the colour, then the whole ocean must have been full of the stuff. He made a move to put his hand into the water with a view, among other things, to letting it cool his skin - it was, after all, stiflingly hot here compared to the interior of the tunnel - but pulled back, suddenly aware of what he should have realised the whole time. He did not know what toxins or pathogens existed in this alien water. Or, for that matter, in the air. His lungs were protected by the mask from the more elementary difference in atmospheric composition, but large areas of skin were still exposed. What was worse, he may have been carrying viruses and bacteria of his own that would endanger this environment. He had assumed, without even giving it conscious thought, that his Hosts would not have compelled him to come here, would not have provided the means for his transport to this planet and his survival while on it, without adequately protecting him from its more subtle dangers, and vice versa. But now he felt that may have been an assumption too far. He had no idea what their true motivations were or how much they were willing to rely on his own common sense for the protection of everyone concerned.

Even as this thought occurred to him he could feel the bare skin on his arms begin to itch. Most likely psychosomatic, he thought to himself, but nevertheless decided this first foray onto the surface of this planet had probably gone on long enough. He made his way back up the black beach and into the airlock.

-Day 3903

"Thursday, November 3, 10: Afternoon. ... looking forward to a more convenient mode of transport."

He was waiting for the final piece of a new bicycle - the single cast front wheel - to assemble itself on the fabricator plate. With that done he would finally be able to traverse this system of tunnels in style, or at least with relative ease.

The itch on his skin after exposure to the planet's raw environment had proved to be real after all, possibly an allergic reaction to something in the air. It developed into a rash that spread up both arms and extended to his shoulders and neck, and on the exposed areas of his face. For a time he was seriously concerned about what its prognosis would prove to be, but it had disappeared entirely within a few hours and left no symptoms, visible or otherwise. Nevertheless he decided to fabricate some form of full body covering for future excursions. So he had set out on a trek back to the Fabricator with the purpose of producing a more suitable set of clothes, and also to construct a bicycle that would make further explorations easier on his feet. The challenge of this maze did not lie in the complexity of its structure but in its length, though he did take the opportunity to continue mapping and marking the system of tunnels, both in his journals and at key points along the route.

That route took him back to the Observatory where he had hoped to see NewEarth through the magnifying eyes of the telescope, or to discover what was indicated here by the green pointer, but the sky was still too overcast to see anything other than clouds. It had been his misfortune to arrive here during a stormy period, which he knew could last for weeks. With nothing new to learn there he had continued trudging to the Fabricator, arriving in the dark of noon on the Thursday. He spent the rest of that day and well into the evening waiting for bicycle parts or articles of clothing and assembling them into units.

-Day 3906

He tested the new bike with a six hour ride through the tunnel connecting the Fabricator to the Cannon bunker, ending back at his point of arrival. From there two paths were not yet explored and he had selected one of them at the flip of a proverbial coin, setting out at first light of the following day. Along the way he noticed the ambient light in the tunnel brighten with the sun, now sometimes fully exposed, spilling broad, sharp pools of light on the floor and walls. Through the windows isolated clumps of thick cloud hung like cotton balls suspended in an otherwise clear purple sky.

He reached the tunnel terminus just before midday - another airlock. By the time he had prepared himself for a second excursion to the outside, the whole area had become darkened by the noon eclipse of the sun behind NewEarth. He stepped out onto a surface of coarse stone, feeling his way cautiously in the dark, the gentle sound of waves against rock the only thing audible in otherwise silent air. Not quite silent. There were intermittent unidentified sounds - faint chirps and whistles - seemingly in the distance. Overhead the ghostly face of NewEarth, seen by nothing more than the faint glint of its own albedo, was the only source of illumination, and even that faded as the peak of noon approached. The fact that midday was, if anything, darker than midnight was an inversion in the diurnal cycle that this region necessarily shared with his own City. Oddly, that was one point of familiarity offering some small comfort in this strange land.

He waited out the eclipse close to the tunnel entrance until the abrupt return of the sun from behind NewEarth revealed the scene in detail. The tall peak of the Mountain was still prominent behind the skyline to the east, now unobstructed by cloud, and the tunnel he had traversed that morning stretched across a flat expanse of dark brown ocean, terminating on the small rocky islet on which he was standing. Abutting the rock on the other side, and much larger than it, was one of the tree-like structures he had seen from the shore. Further out he could see others rising out of the ocean like islands, and to the south the distant coast shimmered in a haze of heat. The deep purple colour of the sky, clear apart from a few small clouds, was more than enough to dispel any remaining temptation to feel at home here. Around the base of the rocks a gentle swell rhythmically raised and lowered the level of the water. Just below the surface the same hair-like fronds of sea grass he had seen on the coast covered the whole area of ocean for as far as he could see in all directions, concealing his view of the depths. There was no way he could tell how deep the water was - for all he knew this grass might have been hundreds of metres long or it might have come no further than his waist, not that he was willing to test it. Small eel-like creatures darted in and out among the fronds in little shoals, as did one or two larger, flatter animals. More sounds - distant squawks and chirps - drew his attention to the sky above where he could see a small formation of dark objects gliding overhead. He watched them for a time trying to determine if they were more likely artefact or animal. In the end he decided on the latter, perhaps the local equivalent of birds or bats, though he could make out no details.

Making his way across the rocks he found the outer surface of the tree sufficiently textured with hand grips and foot holds to allow for an easy climb to higher levels where thick protrusions made effective walkways. It was peppered with numerous smooth rimmed holes that penetrated deep into the trunk. The bark itself in its fine detail was pale grey with a strong grain that curved around in prominent loops and arcs. Up close it could have been mistaken for any number of terrestrial species - scribbly bark or ghost gum or hickory. Higher up, far beyond the reach of close inspection, a lush canopy of broad, straight branches stuck out from the trunk and covered a wide area like a huge green awning. Other than its immense size it certainly looked very much like a tree, though he was still not prepared to claim for certain that it was a naturally occurring living thing.

Around its outside, at the level to which he had managed to climb, some of the openings were large enough for him to poke his head through, like windows in the thick timber wall. The hollow interior was well shaded from the sun, but enough light still filtered through the upper foliage and other openings to see it clearly. There was a whole ecosystem lining the inside wall, far richer than what was on the outside - red and blue growths like flowers, twisted vines that hung like ropes from anchor points far above, bulbous pores dripping with slime that ran down the inside wall, patches glowing with bioluminescent light which became more concentrated lower down, making it easy to see water at the base, like the bottom of a well. The water there was roiling and splashing with living activity as if a school of fish had become trapped inside. It was alive with sound as well, buzzing and scratching and occasionally a brief mournful cry echoed through the cavernous hollow, and a rich cocktail of odours wafted at him from all directions. On two or three occasions a sudden sound and movement in the corner of his eye alerted him to something falling from above. When he was quick enough to catch a glimpse he saw a gelatinous creature, about the size of a puppy, falling down the inner trunk and issuing a rather alarming squawk as it did.

Lining the inner surface of the trunk a large number of transparent, water filled pustules covered every part of the wall not given over to something else. They varied in size from tiny - the size of a pea or smaller - to slightly bigger than his head. Each held an embryonic organism, large enough to occupy most of the available space, that could be seen wriggling inside. They appeared to be eggs attached to the wall. After many minutes of watching he was fortunate enough to catch one of these creatures in the process of hatching. One of the larger eggs not very far from him burst open, its fluid contents spilling down the side close enough to splash him on the way. The creature, like a stocky orange manta with a wide frill along half the length of its body, then emerged writhing from the opening. He had a few seconds to observe it as closely as he would wish to. It seemed to have no eyes, but it did have a fleshy, toothless mouth that smacked and slobbered as it struggled to pull itself free. He saw a fleshy air sack around the girth of its frame inflate and quickly collapse again as it let out a shrill cry. Then it fell, gracelessly sliding down the inner trunk, hitting various obstacles on the way and letting out a shriek with each one before joining with its jostling companions in the pool below.

The whole scene held a fascination that distracted him from the uncomfortable reality of this environment, but now that reality was starting to hold sway. His skin was starting to itch in spite of the tight coverings he had applied for protection, and the heat and humidity were exacerbated because of them. His eyes were stinging and the smell had progressed from sickly to nauseating. As he made his way back down the trunk and across the rocks he took a moment to savour his first clear view of NewEarth from this vantage. As the afternoon sun sank lower in the sky, dawn was approaching the City on NewEarth. Where night still had dominance the shadowy orb overhead was, if anything, closer to a normal blue than the rest of the sky. Across the daytime half the growing crescent face exposed more and more of the great continent, tracing the path he had taken on his journey to cross it. That journey felt so long ago now. Another life, he thought. He had lived so many lives, another one hardly mattered.

In the cool of the tunnel he made use of the last of the afternoon light through the windows to note the day's events.

"Sunday, November 6, 10: Evening. ... first serious encounter with more complex indigenous life ..."

He went on to describe what he had found in terms that he understood, giving names to the principal players - "treeisland" and "barkfish". The latter was, he thought, a cute play on the way those creatures were born and the sound they made. As he looked over what he had written and thought about what he had seen that afternoon, the true significance of his situation on this planet began, as if for the first time, to penetrate into his awareness. Planets on which aboriginal life of even the simplest kind had come to exist were rare in the universe. They were known to be rare. The conditions which led to the spontaneous formation of living matter were tightly constrained, and the obstacles to its formation were numerous. And planets where aboriginal life thrived and evolved were even rarer. As a youth, living and growing on Earth, not a single instance other than Earth itself was known. Not one. Indeed by the time the first such example was confirmed in the Milky Way, the number of planets supporting relocated colonies of terrestrial life exceeded all those supporting native life that would ever be found in that galaxy. He himself had visited or occupied several worlds other than Earth, and had lived several lifetimes separated by millennia of sleep, before learning that organisms not descended from those of his own homeworld even existed. By that time the rarity of naturally occurring living ecosystems had become a point of moral concern in its own right. Such planets were afforded protection from any and all interference. For the sake of curiosity, non-terrestrial life could be studied, but only on the proviso and to the extent that the flow of information from those studies was strictly one way. Natural human senses were far too clumsy to provide any assurance to that effect, and so human flesh, in any of its forms, had never been in direct contact with any life not drawn from the ecosystems of Earth.

Of course that could never be known with certainty. In a galaxy where the time taken to communicate a single thought might span the rise and fall of empires, secrets are easily kept. The children of humankind had been mindful of this even as they spread themselves across space. They were mindful, too, of the importance of carrying their most sacred principles with them wherever they went and had devised subtle and clever schemes to ensure that it was ever the case. But within those schemes they had placed, very deliberately, a single loophole. It was an exception forced by a deep conflict between two of their own most elemental moral rules: never to interfere and always to tell the truth. So it was accepted that should humanity, in the course of its study of the universe, ever encounter a mind similar to itself - in broad terms, intellectually, technologically and morally - then contact would be allowed that went both ways.

Within the confines of the Milky Way no such mind had ever been found, and there were good reasons to think it was not there to be found. In fact there were reasons to think it would not be found anywhere for at least tens of millions of years, the odds against life surviving and evolving for long enough to reach that point were thought to be so extreme, and the distances separating any instance that did arise so large. But the universe is big and the opportunities for interesting things to happen are numerous. Stars and planets, which close up can seem so grand and immutable, form like raindrops in a thunderstorm and fall just as quickly. Viewed at that scale the rare becomes expected and even the unexpected will occasionally occur, and by great good fortune the first case of a technologically advanced race independent of humanity was found relatively quickly and relatively close. The plan to make optimum use of this circumstance - the only plan, put together over thousands of years and spanning the distance between galaxies - was brought into play. And at the heart of that plan a single human being, a representative of humanity at its most basic, its biological origins, was chosen to bear the torch.

What he was experiencing was not merely the first time he had personally encountered life of non-terrestrial origin. It was, in all likelihood, the first time two organisms from different worlds had made physical contact - ever. And like all firsts, there would only be one of them. However none of the organisms he had seen so far had struck him as particularly sophisticated intellectually. Certainly the barkfish, though higher on the evolutionary tree than the plants and insects, did not seem to qualify. That encounter, he surmised, was yet to happen.

-Day 3908

It was nearing the start of the midnight eclipse when he mounted the stairs to the Observatory dome. It was really only luck that brought him to the Observatory at that time. He had ridden from the treeisland to the cannon bunker, and from there had taken the only remaining untried path. It proved to be nothing more than an alternative route to the Observatory, his own inscriptions on the walls being the proof he had not found a second one, and he could not suppress a small twinge of disappointment at the anticlimax. Nevertheless if, as he hoped, the sky remained cloudless as it had for the last few days, he could expect a clear view of NewEarth through the telescope that evening.

As it happened that was indeed the case. In the minutes before the start of the eclipse its entire face was full and bright, a combination of size and natural albedo making it so dazzling he had to turn up the filter to observe it comfortably. He couldn't recall Lune looking as bright. He could easily pick out the City as a circular orange spot dead centre of the disk, neatly sitting on an edge between a blue ocean to the west and the long equatorial continent, that had been his home for so many years, stretching all the way back to the eastern edge. There were signs, though now somewhat obscured by cloud banks, of other large land masses to the north-west and south-west, and a prominent archipelago of islands spanning much of the northern hemisphere. He'd noticed each of these features during the cannonball flight, but tonight he felt free to observe them in a more relaxed state of mind than he had then.

He pushed the telescope's magnification to its maximum and began to retrace his journey from east to west along the Great Continent which, thankfully, was largely void of cloud cover. Here were the forests and deserts he'd crossed, the mountain ranges he'd climbed, the central Great Lake he'd had to detour around, the rivers he'd had to ford - all laid out in a single view. With each location he could recall the key incidents - when he'd fended off a lion attack in the savannah, the section of rainforest where Nightshade had gone missing for a whole day, the loss of his buggy while crossing a mountain range during a storm - as well as the emotional highs and lows. It all looked so simple from a distance. Here and there he could see the unmistakable signs of the artificial structures he recognised as indicating terramines or the sprawling pipe mazes, including the ones he had visited near the Great Lake, and others he had not seen at all but from this angle looked remarkably near to where he had been. The view did not extend to the continent's eastern coast which lay beyond the curved horizon, so he could see nothing that called to mind his first years on that planet.

He manoeuvred the telescope's focal point so that it was directed straight up, and then lay on his back to view the City without craning his neck. All of the major landmarks so familiar to him, and many of the smaller ones, were clearly visible and instantly identifiable. The wide channel of water separating the mainland from the island City's outer wall appeared as a narrow moat, the outer wall itself was a thin circular outline, the superhighway come cannon barrel clear as a radial line connecting it to the very centre, the telescope's counterpart - obvious only because he knew where it was - staring back at him, even the monorail track was visible like a single strand of spiderweb threading its way around in a convoluted loop. He could pick out the flood channels, apparent as three equally spaced radial slices, and the art districts and the Octopus. All familiar, yet strangely new from this fresh perspective. The sight of them stirred an odd sense of homesickness and a deep longing to return, but he knew there was work here still to do.

He turned down the magnification until the whole scene appeared as it would from outside, seen with eyes alone. The penumbral shadow and the darker umbra that followed had already taken a large bite from the disk over the ocean to the City's west, which faced east from his position. He watched for half an hour as the shadow crept slowly across, darkening each landmark in turn until NewEarth was visible only as a faint ring around its circumference and an occasional flash of lightning from storms raging to the north west. With the night now at its darkest he switched on the green pointer, which indicated an unremarkable point in the western sky midway from horizon to zenith. He ramped up the magnification and the contrast.

There was something there. A single star sitting alone and not very bright, even at maximum magnification and enhancement, but picked out by the green marker with a precision that defied any suggestion of coincidence. That star had importance to his Hosts, and he had a thought about what that importance might be. Just as NewEarth had been modelled on his own homeworld in the Milky Way, so Lune, the planet he was now standing on, had been modelled after a planet - as shown to him by the orrery, smallest of four and nearest to its sun - orbiting that star at that very moment. The life he was encountering here had originated there, untold aeons ago.

Bit by bit the Hosts were introducing themselves.

-Day 3911

It was early in the morning, just before sunrise, when he stepped through the east airlock and stood again on the shore of the dark brown ocean. Though his map of the tunnels was not yet complete, he had decided to explore this region one more time before investigating the last of the unknown branches. The darkness of night had already started to lift and the approaching dawn was visible as a layer of deep red spread across the eastern skyline. It looked spectacular, but at the same time disturbingly unnatural - almost gruesome - as if the sky had been painted with blood. Once again he had to remind himself that this was not his world, and he had no right judging it according to his terms.

The temperature was warm, but not yet uncomfortable, and a light breeze blew from the north, which was the direction of the open sea. On the crest of the hill facing south, silhouetted in black against the brightening sky, were three compact mounds like large boulders. By position they corresponded exactly, as far as he could tell, to the strange clouds he had seen on his last visit. They had not moved. But they now appeared quiet and uninteresting - had they looked like that last time, he thought, he would not have paid any attention to them. But it was primarily these he had come to investigate more closely.

They appeared to shimmer around the edges as if seen through a heat haze, and as he began to walk in their direction - or perhaps as the light from the rising sun fell on them - the shimmer grew stronger until they were gyrating with all the intensity they had shown previously. And even more. Their expansion and oscillations became more frenetic, yet nevertheless somehow more orderly - complex but not random or chaotic. At times the border separating them became indistinct and they became two or even one single throbbing cloud. He continued walking in their direction, becoming more aware as he did of the sound emanating from them, essentially buzzing but with a musical order befitting the visual display. He could also see now that they were composed of vast numbers of individual units - a swarm, extending itself towards him even as he drew nearer to it. He froze, uncertain if this behaviour constituted a threat. The leading edge of the swarm was almost on him before he could see clearly what he now felt he should have expected. These were the wasps, the same insects he had seen occupying the Nest, the same insects that had on occasion tracked him as he moved along the tunnels. They were circling him, keeping a respectful distance but matching the structure of their collective motion to his every move. As they came closer, first few in number and then at ever greater density he could feel his heart quicken and his skin tingle with adrenaline. Yet his anxiety diminished even as exhilaration increased. Though there was still potential danger here, danger in the approach of an unknown agent in the absence of protection, he no longer felt any real fear. He pulled the gloves from his hands and extended his arms, palms up in a personal gesture of submission as they encroached on his space, coming within inches of his face and fingers. The pattern of their motion as they flew in and back out was anything but random - imprinted within it he could see echoes of his own form, his arms and legs, torso and head, distorting as it propagated like a density wave back into the swarm. The sound they made as a bulk entity, engulfing the air around his ears, matched the structure and rhythm of their motion almost precisely.

Then they touched him. Queueing up, alighting one by one, very briefly and very gently, on his hands, his face, his hair and neck, his clothing, then flying off, carrying some part of his shape and form. He could feel them on him, tickling, probing, each landing only for an instant but in such quick succession that it felt like a continuous embrace.

In the core of his being he felt the significance of this moment, and it was by no means lost on him. He knew this was not a mere swarm of insects come to lick the sweat from his body or instinctively attack an intruder. This was intelligence and purpose - curiosity, reaching out, seeking to understand. This was it. This was what he had come to do. This was why he had traversed the space between galaxies. This is what humankind had waited to do, desired to do for the whole of its existence. It was happening right here and it was happening right now. And of all humans it was happening to him.

First contact!

"Hello there," said the alien as several of the wasps lingered on his palm for almost a full second. "And greetings to you too." A visible alteration in the pattern of their motion around him seemed to result from the sound of his voice, muffled though it was through the breathing mask. "You can hear me, can't you?" There it was again, immediate but less pronounced this time, as if they had learned to expect it.

He moved cautiously forward. Another change in the gestalt shape of their bulk behaviour. He quickened his pace towards the trio of fixed clouds that was the source of this swarm, obscured though they now were by the mass of tiny dark green bodies that filled the space around him. The behaviour of the swarm was changing with almost every step, becoming more chaotic and more frenetic. They were landing on him in greater numbers, striking him at greater speed, and, he couldn't help noticing, concentrating this activity more on his front than his back. It may have been nothing other than coincidence, but the impression he was receiving was overwhelmingly telling him that this behaviour was something more. And some forms of communication, he knew, were so basic and universal that they would transcend even the widest gulf.

"Don't want to wear out the welcome," he voiced aloud, and started backing away. Almost immediately the wasps reverted to a more orderly and gentle interaction.

The density of the swarm dwindled as he approached the tunnel entrance, but some numbers remained even as he opened the outer door, extending as a long rarefied cloud down the hill. Only when he entered the airlock did they cease caressing his body entirely, and even when he was fully inside he could still see them forming spirals and ripples against the tunnel window.

He felt exhilarated - more alive than he could remember ever having felt before. He began to write of the incident in a journal;

"Friday, November 11, 10: Afternoon. ... I believe I have found the kenthoni ..."

Kenthoni.

The name was from the lore of OldEarth, from the myths and tales of that civilisation where it symbolised little more than the mysterious Other. Its etymology, however, was much older than that - dating back to long before it symbolised anything at all. Back to when the stars and the patterns they formed on the sky had only ever been seen from a single point in space and very nearly a single point in time. Back to the childhood of humanity, and to his own childhood, on Earth. There those patterns of stars appeared fixed and eternal, and because they were fixed they could be identified with names that stuck for the lifetimes of those that named them, and their children, and their grandchildren. They were named for animals - lions and bulls and scorpions. They were named for people - hunters and maidens and water bearers. They were named for things - scales and crosses. And they were named for mythical beasts like the one with the head and chest of a human and the hindquarters of a horse - the Centaur. Even when it became known that those patterns were not fixed - not just as a theory but as the real passage of time and the shifting perspective across huge spans of space had distorted them beyond all recognition - even when the original namers had been dead for many generations - even then some part of those names could be found clinging to some of the stars and other objects that had made up the patterns originally. And so it was when the very first evidence of mind on a par with that which had long before descended from humankind was discovered and confirmed, it was discovered in a galaxy that had once occupied the pattern of the Centaur. The galaxy itself had been renamed and renumbered so often that all connection to its origin was broken. The priests of OldEarth had called it Tingard, a name whose origin was itself an entirely different story. But the beings that lived there, whose activities had been seen from so great a distance, even when nothing else at all was known about them, were given a name that retained some shadow of that long history: Kenthoni - those that dwell with the Centaurs.

Even as he was penning this record he was aware that he might be taking a step too far on the basis of very limited information. While he was convinced the wasp swarms represented a substantial degree of sentience, it was not at all clear that they represented the pinnacle of natural intelligence - the equivalent of what human beings had become on Earth. There were certain to be many new forms of life to discover on this world, and among those might be the true heirs of biological evolution. But the fact that he had already encountered these creatures on NewEarth was suggestive, if only he could tell what it was suggestive of. Moreover it was equally unclear whether individual wasps had significant intelligence of their own or if it mostly resided in the swarm, or in the sessile mass that appeared to be their source and which they had been so determined to defend from his presence.

" ... there is a great deal more investigation to be done here," he concluded the entry.

-Day 3914

It was early in the afternoon when he reached the end of the final unexplored branch of the tunnel system, and he waited until the sun had reappeared after the noon eclipse before venturing outside. First he made a note of the event in his journal, scratching out the question mark at the fabricator junction and sketching in a new corridor terminated by another airlock. Of course it was possible he had missed a hidden passage or three somewhere along the hundreds of kilometres of tunnel, many of which he'd traversed in the semi dark. It was something he'd have to remember to be on the lookout for as he moved about in future. But for now he considered the map of the interior part of this world complete.

He was standing on a wide flat region of yellow clay and small pebbles, blown hard with a stiff hot wind. It might have been a dried flood plain or desert badland anywhere, except that here and there it was patched with low mounds of the sponge vegetation that had covered the coastal region entirely. The tunnel he had come through arced away to the north where the skyline was still dominated by the triangular outline of the Mountain. The exterior of the tunnel end was covered in a kind of scaffolding, constructed of thick timber beams and rusted metal struts, that did not seem in keeping with the design of the tunnel otherwise and did not seem to be serving any obvious function. It would have obstructed his exit from the airlock except it had been roughly torn away right by the hatch, leaving a mess of broken beams and twisted metal. He tested the scaffolding for stability and rigidity and, finding it sound, utilised it to gain a dozen metres height for a better view of the surrounding land. From there he could see, beyond a skyline of low rocky peaks to the south-east, a group of chimney stacks belching wisps of fine vapour into the air. That, he recognised easily, was a terramine, confirming what he already knew \- that, like NewEarth, this world was being artificially re-purposed for life not native to it. To the west of the terramine and spanning a wide area further in that direction was what appeared to be a dense forest of tall lime-green spikes. They must have been very large to be so clearly visible from so great a distance, but they were also disorderly to the point of looking almost comical, sticking out randomly at a variety of angles as if tussled by a giant hand. To the east and spreading around to the north the clumps of sponge grass merged into a continuous landscape of undulating black hills. Of greater interest however, in the middle distance in the direction of the forest he counted five of the kenthoni cloud masses, spread out over a small angle. They were showing the same kind of organised pulsations he had seen on the coast. Two of them were sitting high above the ground, each atop its own elaborate brown platform as large as a city block. Though it was difficult to tell from a distance the platforms looked artificial - the edges too sharp and the angles too clean to be natural formations.

The sun was beating down from a purple sky and the air was thick and sultry, but he decided to take the walk at least some of the way to the nearest of the platformed kenthoni. The structure on which it sat was high and majestic and appeared, the more so as he came nearer, to be made of rusted iron. At its base a series of enormous caterpillar treads, like those of an army tank, gave the distinct impression of potential mobility, though at that moment it looked as solid and immutable a part of the landscape as any mountain.

The swarm of wasps surrounding the structure appeared to become more and more agitated the closer he approached. Mindful of breaching local protocols he backed away slowly and began to skirt around to the side. The swarm adjusted its bulk orientation as if to track his movements. Viewed as a single amorphous organism, an easy perspective to take with a little imagination, it was certainly imposing - like a giant amoeba, huge and vital, seemingly aware of its surroundings and presumably capable of great agility and quick action.

It began to expand in his direction. Hoping for another meet and greet he stood his ground, arms raised in a gesture of acceptance. Almost immediately he could sense something about this encounter that was not right. The first wave began striking him with remarkable heft on his face and torso, and from there escalated in ferocity as the density of the swarm increased around him. Not a congenial meeting like the one on the coast, this was a deliberate assault.

"Hey!" he called out, instinctively covering his head with his arms in a defensive posture. The sound of his voice seemed to distract them momentarily, giving him the chance to reorient himself in the direction of the airlock, hoping that a hasty retreat would undo whatever offence had motivated this behaviour. But the attack resumed with even greater force, coordinated waves delivering blow after blow to all parts of his body. Vainly he tried to swat them away as they easily compensated his every move, and crying out in protest no longer provided any respite as they habituated to the sounds he made. Though they seemed to lack any natural ability to bite or sting - abilities he felt convinced they would have brought to bear if they could - they were robust and swift enough to launch a cumulative battering that had become debilitating and genuinely terrifying. Nor was the intention simply to drive him off - he would gladly have complied with that if he could, but the force of the offensive had immobilised him.

Suddenly the attack seemed to die down sufficiently to permit a rapid retreat back to the gate, an opportunity he quickly made the most of. First impressions would have suggested they were satisfied that whatever point they had wanted to make had been made and they were letting him go, but when he had opened the airlock and was assured he could readily shut himself inside, he dared a brief glance back. What he saw astonished him. Batteries of fast moving wasps were still firing themselves towards him in thick jets. But they were now being deftly and very effectively blocked from their target by another swarm that had come in from the side, and whose origin he quickly traced to the lone kenthoni cloud sitting on the ground at some distance to the back. It had extended itself all the way across the plain and had engaged its platformed counterpart with such vigour that each colliding pair of wasps fell to the ground in a gathering heap of writhing bodies. The heap was evaporating as fast as it was formed as each individual insect, apparently not very much the worse for wear, shook itself off and rejoined its respective swarm for another run. On a larger scale the two swarms were coming together like merging storm clouds, the black sheet comprising their mutual border alive with intensely expressive visual displays \- animated spirals, rays and starbursts formed from rapidly fluctuating density waves. The sound of these various interactions was loud enough to be audible as a continuous guttural roar interspersed with an almost lyrical drumming.

He could not help but read into this configuration, with no small sense of gratitude, a very intriguing interpretation. It seemed he had been rescued.

Back in the airlock with the door safely shut behind he sat for a long while nursing bruised limbs, a welting back and stinging cheeks. He felt like the victim of an old time stoning. Contemplating the encounter, Quill and journal at the ready to mark down his thoughts, he tried to understand what it could have meant. It was entirely possible that the modes of thinking he was accustomed to would not be adequate for that task, dealing as they were with a system of biology and cognition different from anything anyone of his kind had ever experienced. Or it might equally have a perfectly mundane explanation - some of these creatures were fearful and hateful of anything appearing in their world as new or strange while others were tolerant and accepting. Was that really so different from what might be expected of his own race - indeed what he knew to be the case from history, and had frequently observed with his own eyes? It even made sense that this would be the case. Life was fragile and its continued existence required treading the fine line marking the boundary between those circumstances necessary to maintain it, and those circumstances sufficient to extinguish it. Where the environment alone did not guarantee that line could be held, intelligence arose to force it actively, and the more delicate and complex the balancing act became, the more intelligence evolved to sustain it. The result was, perhaps, a universal - representing precisely the two attitudes that might reasonably be expected from sentient life when it encountered something new - fear and curiosity. The great conflict. On the positive side it was a sign of intelligence that individuals drawn from the same species could differ so radically in their behaviour. It suggested personality, diversity of opinion and abstraction of thought - the very traits he had come to find. But it also left him wondering how great an upheaval his arrival on this world had been for these creatures. Was it something that had been expected, even anticipated, or was it a culture shock that felt to them like an invasion? And what knowledge of him did they possess before he had appeared in front of them? Did they have any contact with the Hosts, and how were they related to the Hosts? Had they been briefed on who he was, what he was and where he had come from - or did they know as much about him as he knew about them - which was essentially nothing? Nevertheless he could not help feeling a strong gratitude to the courageous benefactor who had intervened on his behalf. At the very least that deserved a name. Dredging up age old memories of the long dead culture of his past he found only one reference that was close enough to be appropriate, and wrote it down before it had a chance to fade again \- Pocahontas.

-Day 3949

It was five weeks after the newcomer had been attacked by the natives at the South Gate, and he had not been outside in that region since then. That was not for want of trying. Emboldened to face his fears by discoveries made in the meantime and the urge to push his explorations further, he had attempted another excursion to the southern region in the evening some days earlier, but the outer airlock would open only a crack before it jammed against something on its exterior. Now he was set to try again.

He had, however, learnt much during those weeks along the coastal region through the East Gate and at the treeisland in the west. The skin rash that had bothered him briefly following the first few sojourns outdoors gradually became less of an irritant. That may have been psychological or he may have been developing a tolerance to whatever was causing it, but either way he was spending more time outside and becoming more adventurous - wandering further from the gates, making closer and more direct contact with life forms and environments, even spending an occasional night outdoors, sleeping under the open sky. He had explored along the coast over a span of tens of kilometres, from the west where the path was blocked by a field of bare jagged rocks, to the east where he was stopped by an unfordable river delta - taking in bluffs and inlets, pebbly beaches and shorelands covered by the ever present sponge lawn. As he went about these explorations he was encountering and documenting - and naming - many of the local species. He had splashed the local waters over his bare skin and face in a bid to cool off with no ill effect, though he had decided that tasting it or consuming anything else grown locally was too great a risk to take.

From the high cliffs he could observe dozens of isolated treeislands far out to sea, a sparse forest of huge trees on the ocean surface, some dying or dead, even floating collapsed and horizontal like derelict hulks of driftwood, as well as smaller ones that might have been saplings. Even from a height the sea maintained its continuous dark brown hue all the way to the horizon, which close inspection at the shore had revealed to be due to fibrous redweed floating near the surface.

Further inland he often found regions of thin triangular stemmed vegetation about waist high, growing haphazardly from the ground like tall grass, its bright green colouring a welcome touch of normalcy in this otherwise rather gloomy environment. Based on nothing other than the most superficial of resemblances he called this spinifex. The regions ranged in size from a few meters across to fields he would have had trouble skirting around had he needed to. The edge of each stem was firm and very sharp, discouraging him from walking through it, and hanging from many was a small vine that writhed like a worm and exuded a sticky thread like spider silk when touched, further discouraging close contact. He would have thought it useful for the capture of prey, but he had seen no other signs of direct predation here. Occasionally one of these spinifex worms would drop to the ground where it continued to wriggle about producing thick tangles of silk. In places it was difficult to walk without the soles of his shoes becoming coated with a layer of gummy fibres and writhing worms that were difficult to remove.

On the bare ground along the cliff tops, or on the pebbly beaches, he frequently came across squat plants growing in isolation like spiny stumps. A small animal similar to a mouse but with a spiky coat like that of a porcupine seemed to be associated with these. He could not at first tell how these creatures were related to the plants - whether they burrowed beneath it or fed on it, but eventually decided they grew while attached to it. They would crawl away slowly along the ground, and he had occasionally seen one stop, bury itself partway in the coarse dirt and, apparently, die. He called this whole arrangement the pig-cactus. Another kind of plant, dubbed the hair-melon, was about the size and general appearance of a watermelon but covered in fine yellow fur like moss, and was home to creatures looking very much like scorpions. They would scurry away across the ground in all directions if their nest was disturbed. Their speed and aimlessness, not to mention their appearance, startled him the first time he saw it, but like most of the organisms here they showed little interest in him at all - either positive or negative.

The kenthoni wasps remained the sole exception to that rule.

Cautious at first after the encounter at Southgate, he found the coastal natives continued to behave gently with him, often greeting him when he emerged from the Eastern Gate, though he deliberately gave their core swarms a wide berth. He was constantly aware of his status as a guest in their world, and one with only the dimmest knowledge of their customs, taboos or the ramifications of even the slightest misstep. In addition to the three visible from the eastern airlock his explorations had found another five swarms - a close pair in the west, another pair across the river in the east that he saw only from a distance, and a lone individual sitting on top of an isolated sponge covered hill. These had shown awareness of his presence and an initial curiosity, but were reticent to make any deeper connection, and neither had he attempted it. The initial three remained the principal focus of his investigations, and he had thought it fitting to give them individual names as a result. The one on the left he christened Bee-Friend, on the right was Bee-Haave and the one in the middle, the closest to the gate and most active in its interactions with him, he named Bee-Good and immediately nicknamed Johnny. He wondered if they had true names of their own, and if he would ever come to know if they did.

He was increasingly convinced of their high level of sentience - a conclusion informed by several observations. He had seen them using tools and making artefacts - individual wasps acting in a concerted and coordinated way within a larger collective, hauling long sticks into position and stitching them together using thick vines and the sticky extrusions from the spinifex worms. This was more than instinctive symbiosis. While he was never sure of the purpose of these constructions, there was little doubt they were deliberately built. The swarms were certainly able to communicate, utilising both sound and physical contact across broad regions of their expanded volume to coordinate activity and influence behaviour, and he had even had some success communicating with them himself. It had proved possible to convey simple abstract concepts by constructing geometric shapes on the ground from pebbles and sticks and having them respond by modifying those images in meaningful ways. This further cemented the conviction that these were creatures of some intellect, though attempts to convey higher thoughts, such as prime numbers and the operations of arithmetic, seemed to be less effective.

In spite of their vast numbers and frequent close proximity it was a challenge forming a clear picture of what an individual wasp actually looked like. They were far to quick when alive and active to observe in any detail, and they were always active. On several occasions he had watched dead or injured wasps being carried away almost ceremoniously by an entourage of their companions - to where he as yet had no idea. Only once had he found a dead one on its own, isolated from the rest of the swarm partially hidden behind some rocks by the waters edge. He had not known what to do with it. It seemed inappropriate to procure it as a specimen for close study, much as he wanted to do just that. So he simply looked at it from a respectful distance without touching it, noting and sketching the details of its appearance - its slightly elongated bulky body with no clear distinction between head and tail, its three groups of stubby wings, fore, mid and aft, its four circles of raised iridescent bumps front and back that he took to be compound eye spots, its several rows top and bottom of legs, or antennae, or both, the black and bright green loops and swirls like fingerprints marking the rest of its surface - and then left it where it lay. He did, on another occasion, try to briefly capture a live one by gently enclosing it in his hands, but a marked increase in the agitation of the swarm around him, more so than the singleton itself, had compelled him to quickly release it again before he'd had the chance to examine it. It remained an open question how much of their intelligence resided in the individual wasp and how much was distributed through the whole swarm. He frequently saw the three coastal swarms merge so completely that he could not tell them apart, but at other times he could discern clear character differences between them - Johnny was by far the more forthright and curious, Bee-Friend was somewhat more reserved with him but seemed to hold greater control within the group, and Bee-Haave was positively shy.

An aspect of kenthoni behaviour he had noted was a strict avoidance of open bodies of water and a refusal to venture any distance beyond the shoreline. It was as if the boundary between land and sea imposed a physical barrier they could not cross. He also noticed that they were strictly diurnal, their activity during the hours of night reduced to a bare minimum. Indeed most of the animate life on the planet seemed to shut down when the sky darkened and the more it darkened the more they shut down. They even seemed to nap during the noon eclipse and calmed down under heavy cloud, like bees in smoke. It was a fact he thought to exploit to his advantage.

When he finally returned to the southern exit he found the door would open only enough to see that it was barred from the outside by timber scaffolding. So he came back the following evening with a fabricated crowbar to remove the blockages and open the door wide enough to squeeze through. By the pale light of NewEarth he could see the compacted form of the sessile kenthoni hive that had aided him last time - the one he had called Pocahontas - its silhouetted border rippling gently. The platformed hive that had attacked him was not where it had been before, but there were several others he could see at a distance in the dim light. It seemed the platforms were indeed vehicles of some sort. He walked up past Pocahontas, respectfully distant but close enough to see that while the swarm as a whole was calm, individual wasps were still quite active, moving to and fro, patterns forming and unforming in their bulk action and slowly dispersing through the visible volume of the swarm. He had seen something similar among the coastal natives as well - often stepping up closer to Johnny and Bee-Friend and observing that state more intently than was probably appropriate - where he had made careful note of the various kinds of patterns displayed, ranging from the indecipherably abstract to distorted semblances of physical objects, not infrequently including his own humanoid form. He speculated that this state was the equivalent of sleep, a dramatic confirmation of an idea heretofore tested only on beings whose origin could be traced to terrestrial biology - that all minds dream.

He continued walking south beyond the sleeping hive. In places the spongy ground beneath his feet was aglow with light - pinks and yellows in solid irregularly bordered zones or intricately varied patches - possibly due to bioluminescent vegetation or fungi. It was a phenomenon he had not seen on the coast. By this light he could see the ground writhing with thick worms that slithered around him in sinusoidal motion. It was not much before midnight when he reached the outskirts of the forest of tall spikes he had observed in the distance by daylight. By the full, bright light of NewEarth he could see that this forest was similar in appearance to the spinifex he had seen along the coast, but here scaled up enormously. Blades of thick leather rose from the ground haphazardly and towered overhead like trees. There was barely enough space between them to move, and razor sharp serrated edges made it inadvisable to try. Long prehensile vines with the girth of his arm hung from many of these stalks, twisting and swaying under their own power like so many dangling snakes - very much like snakes but for the absence of clear eyes and mouth, and for the covering of fine fur which, he noted, made them look nothing like snakes at all. It was not clear whether this was a different species in the same genus as the spinifex worm, or the same species in adult form. Or something different entirely, the apparent similarity no more than coincidence.

As he reached out to feel the texture of the trunk he inadvertently brushed the serpent hanging from it. Immediately the creature exuded a web of fine threads that adhered to his hand. Motivated by the contact it drew itself towards him and slowly began coiling around his arm. Each new touch and every effort on his part to extract himself stimulated more sticky glue, entangling him further. The process unfolded so gently and gracefully that at first there was no impression of threat. The web was weak enough and the constrictions of the coiling serpent so soft that he felt he could easily extricate himself from its grasp, but the more he tried the more entangled he became. Initially the situation felt faintly ridiculous, even mildly humorous. He chuckled with private embarrassment as his left hand became stuck even while trying to pull the right hand free, then both legs became entwined as two more twisting snakes joined in the sport. It did not take too many minutes to realise this was a much more serious circumstance, particularly as the midnight eclipse reached its climax, robbing him of the sense he needed to see what he was doing. Even then it was only with an odd detachment that he recalled how some kinds of terrestrial plants would ensnare insects, hold them fast until they expired then extract nutrients from their decaying corpses. Most likely they would get no meal from him in that way - his biochemistry was probably too different \- but that was little consolation.

A common rule of thumb and an article of common sense well known to him holds that when struggling makes a situation worse keeping calm can improve it, especially when a mortal threat is not imminent. With every movement resulting in more glue being deployed and more snakes coiling around he made a deliberate resolution to remain perfectly still for a while to see what would happen. For half an hour and more he waited as the coiling serpents relaxed slightly then tightened again and relaxed in slow pulsations, their own movement substituting for his as if teasing him into more activity. Their grip was starting to encroach further up his chest and he was becoming fearful they would soon be wrapped around his neck and face. Carefully he reached in and drew IceNeedle from his tool belt, transferring it to his right hand for a better grip and a more convenient angle even as the wriggling serpents squeezed ever more firmly around his torso. The hairy outer skin was tough, but no match for the razor edge of his knife. Pale pink fluid gushed from the wound along with some internal structure that might have been mistaken for intestines. The creature showed no real sign of having felt pain, but coiled around his chest as it had been until it was completely severed, and even then continued to tighten its grip as best it could in isolation. Now with slightly greater freedom of movement he slashed at several more sinewy bodies that were holding his knees and ankles together. With no bone to slice through it was a relatively simple process, but still took several minutes as he had to work cautiously and surgically to avoid cutting himself at such close quarters, and to limit movement that would stimulate further trammelling. Finally he was able to pull himself free, covered in milky blood, wads of sticky webbing and a considerable mass of still writhing bodies.

Walking back to the gate in the gloom of early morning was slow and exhausting. The sticky adhesions covering his arms and legs, though no longer debilitating, were enough to slow him down. That destination was still some way off when the first rays of the rising sun appeared over the low hills in the east, deep crimson in a purple sky. A mounted kenthoni hive was visible in the distance to the right, clearly stirring from slumber as the central swarm expanded in the light of morning, and beginning to display the intricate spirals and ripples characteristic of wakeful attention. Initially not overly worried he continued walking, though with the faint air of someone moving through a potentially hostile neighbourhood. A vibration through the ground and a rhythmic mechanical sound drew his attention back to the hive. It was no longer just the dark cloud of wasps that had become active - the rusty mount it was sitting on was billowing plumes of black smoke that quickly settled into grey wisps. It jerked from side to side once or twice and began to inch forward, its huge caterpillar treads visibly churning the ground as they started to rotate. The thing was indeed mobile as he had suspected - remarkably mobile in fact as it picked up speed - and heading in his direction. Even then he was more intrigued than concerned, but nonetheless thought it best not to wait so exposed to assess its intentions, and picked up his own pace towards the safety of the airlock. His concern grew with the realisation that a combination of his own hobbled pace and the considerable speed the vehicle had attained would easily place it between himself and his goal. To make the situation worse, long before the gap between them had closed the malleable form of the kenthoni rider began stretching itself towards him. His final faint hope that this might be a display of innocent curiosity was dashed when the swarm hit with both substantial force and deliberate intent. With astonishing precision and dexterity a volley of wasp strikes knocked him face first to the ground with well aimed blows to the back of his knees, and pinned him there by concerted attention to his legs, back and wrists - a constant stream of impacting insects delivering a continuous force that made very effective shackles. It was as if they had contemplated his possible vulnerabilities and were now testing those ideas - successfully. They proceeded then to strip the worm silk from his skin and clothes, and he briefly had an idea that they might have been trying to help him, until they started using it with great skill to bind him even further. Within minutes he was completely immobilised. The physical assault subsided enough for him to sense the vibrations through the ground becoming stronger and the mechanical throbbing of the mobile becoming louder. From his prone position he was able to see the huge vehicle coming closer, and for a terrifying moment he thought it would run right over him. But it rolled slowly past, its great metal treads mere meters from his head - close enough that he could feel the coarse clay dirt crack under the weight, close enough that he could feel greasy black lubricant from the axles splashing him, close enough that he could tell its rust red appearance was more than just a colour choice. The thing really did appear to be made of rusted iron, honed smooth and functional as a building material in its own right, but creating to his eyes the impression of great age and ongoing deterioration, as if it had been salvaged from a junkyard. It continued lumbering past him, its rear end towering above like an ancient metal pantechnicon, dripping with black grease and puffing steam from numerous vents.

As it slowly moved away it seemed that the attention previously focussed on him had moved away with it. He was alone, still fastened to the ground and unable to move, perhaps like a fly wrapped in a silken shroud by a spider, to be consumed at leisure at a later time. For almost an hour he tried with mounting frustration and anxiety to shift the bonds, but they held firm. Each strand individually might have broken easily but in concert they would not allow even enough movement to work his way out. He felt paralysed and started to wonder if they might not have done just that. Once again grizzly analogues from terrestrial biology forced themselves onto his consciousness. He recalled, with no small measure of trepidation, that among the life forms of Earth were certain species of insect whose reproductive cycle included laying eggs on paralysed but still living hosts, thereby supplying their young with fresh meat to consume slowly. It did little to assuage this particular fear to know that such a life cycle was typically highly adapted, and not likely to even be attempted with a random species from another world. Nor did it help that he had already noted the lack of predation among the creatures of this world, and had the germ of an idea to explain it. That theory was too ill-formed to be of much consolation under the circumstances.

As he waited on a fate now entirely out of his control - settling into a detached calmness even he found surprising - he could not help but be mindful once more of the fragility of his existence. He had felt this more keenly over the prior eight weeks than at any other time he could recall. Through the span of several lifetimes he had faced death often, confronted mortal threats, feared for his very life. At times he had even sought out such experiences - not just the risk of death, but death itself - total and certain, embraced deliberately ahead of the promise of a new life and a continued existence on a new world. But the last eight weeks and the current situation differed crucially. His entire life had been spent on his own terms. Even if not under his control, even if under threat of imminent demise, the terms were still his own or those of his race, part of his heritage or his own legacy to himself. Most of the universe was not like that. Now he was aware of being the first of his kind to have left the comfortable zone of human occupation and face the real universe, a universe that was not truly his.

"Flesh and bone does not belong in space," he could hear himself recite like a mantra from the past. "Even as the soul soars the body stays rooted to the Earth."

With the words came the memory - of a time when those words had been spoken in conversation - on Orion, when it was still a raw and violent planet, suitable for human habitation only in small, tightly constrained locales - his home for decades.

"The human form is adapted to some places only, and in those places it should stay." The comment was a reference to the frailty of life - of human life specifically, though he knew it applied equally to all life.

"Yet here you are, Spider." The voice rang out from his memory, clear as a bell despite being, most likely, well over a century old.

The interlocutor, he could recall, was a stocky, hirsute fellow who had gone by the name Chappo-Laphec. His appearance, closer to that of an ape than a man, had been deliberately chosen as an overt expression of humanity's simian origin which was the man's academic speciality. It was always surprising how relatively minor episodes from his past might surface unbidden, and with such random detail. Yet he was also aware that the accuracy of such recollections could not be guaranteed. The memory was likely just a paraphrase of the true conversation, or maybe many conversations held over an extended time somewhere in his past.

"We're here," he had continued, gesticulating around the cavernous underground of Orion, "because we carry a piece of Earth with us wherever we go. A bubble of self preservation, like a suit."

"You're here," Chappo-Laphec had replied, "because the universe permits it. Life has many paths it can take, many ways it can carry forward and many ways it can end. But it has a right to be. That it exists at all means it has a right to be..."

Presently he could feel his skin crawling with a thousand tiny insect bodies, and the bonds began to snap one by one until eventually he was able to pull himself free. As he struggled to his feet and shook himself off, he was able to gain a new perspective on what had happened. He recognised the location close to the airlock and the sessile kenthoni swarm some distance back as Pocahontas. His now twice ally and benefactor had stretched out both in his direction where the swarm's leading edge still hovered, and in the direction of the mounted hive where the two swarms merged and overlapped with violent animation as if deep in conversation. He could make a guess at the nature and topic of that conversation, but had no desire to wait for it to be confirmed. With a clear run to the airlock he took leave of the area without delay.

In the safety of the tunnel, still feeling physically and emotionally drained, he tried with only limited success to speculate about what the experience of that morning might have meant. The most evident explanation, the one he had thought about already and was not able to shake, was that he was the subject of a dispute of sorts among the individuals within the local community. Perhaps it was a clash of ideologies about how he ought to be treated, or the expression of competing theories about what his presence among them might mean. Perhaps he was being tested for character or worthiness, much as the Hosts were keen to test him in the City - the connection between the Hosts and the kenthoni still completely unclear. Or perhaps there was no way to characterise their behaviour in ways he would be familiar with. There was already much about the life of this world that was at odds with what he might have expected from analogy with the kind of biology he understood. But that disconnect was the one thing he should have expected. It had been pointed out often enough in the long history of human enquiry. He had pointed it out himself more than once.

"The soul may soar," he repeated again, "but the body is shackled. And where the body is the mind also must stay..."

Just as the body survives only in places fit for its habitation, so the mind understands only worlds suited to its way of thinking. Evolved to function within a narrow range of environments, there had never been a reason to suppose that body or mind would work beyond that range.

"Yet what we call life," Chappo-Laphec had reminded him all those years ago, returning to consciousness to remind him again now, "what we call life and what we call thought - what we are ourselves - is just the end of a long process, the remainder that is left when everything else is taken away. But we can see it. We can see it because we ourselves are part of just that remnant."

"Being the product of one evolutionary process does not fit us to an environment controlled by another," he had argued, "and ways of thinking suited to a particular way of life should not guarantee access to all truth."

"Both life and mind are infinitely adaptable," Chappo-Laphec had replied, "so all worlds and all truths are available to them. Perhaps it takes time, perhaps it takes hard work, perhaps it takes good luck. But all worlds and all truth can be had. We are not citizens of one place, but of every place - not of one time but of all time. You yourself are the proof of that, Spider, you yourself are the proof."

-Day 3972

Several days had been spent preparing for a major exploration of the treeisland. He had a number of speculations in mind concerning the biology of this planet, and as the kenthoni apparently had no interest in occupying these offshore habitats they were an ideal place to study the lower rungs of the evolutionary ladder. He had manufactured a long spool of rope along with simple climbing tools of his own design - hooks and hammers, clasps, buckles and harnesses of various kinds - transported them to the western airlock and given them some thorough preliminary testing. The expedition had been delayed for another week by ferocious storms that rose suddenly and lashed the whole area, confining him to the safety of the tunnels. He had known, even when observing it from NewEarth, just how violent the weather on this planet could be, but up close it was truly terrifying. During that time the passage over the sea to treeisland was frequently submerged under crashing waves whipped up by tornado force winds, and more than once he feared the structure would not hold together. He had no idea how the kenthoni swarms or other seemingly fragile life could have adapted to survive such frequent hammering.

Now the storms had abated, and as the new day dawned behind the tall spire of the Mountain he was ready to begin.

Climbing as high as he could on the outer trunk using natural handholds and the tree's own texture for support he reached about halfway to the top. From there the trunk narrowed and smoothed to a featureless vertical wall of new growth, but strong enough to take a hook, hammered in with one or two blows and secured with a twist. He was then able to rope himself in before hoisting up to the next level ready for a new hook. The trunk oozed pink sap, like pale blood, in protest at each hook, but they held fast. Finally he attained the level where long, straight branches, thick with broad, flat leaves, stuck out from the trunk at right angles like a horizontal forest, forming a wide ring around the circumference of the tree. Navigating his way through branch by branch he emerged onto the top, a flat green roof of leaves and branches, easily sturdy enough to take his weight all the way to the edge.

The view out over the canopy took in the dominating peak of the Mountain to the east where the sun was just beginning to show itself, and the shoreline to the south, hazy with heat and distance. In all other directions was dark red ocean, punctuated here and there all the way to the horizon by more treeislands like the one he was on, and the occasional rocky outcrop protruding from the water's surface. A light breeze was blowing, cooling his face after the exertions of the climb in what was otherwise a muggy morning. He could hear the faint rustle of the breeze through the canopy of leaves below, but that was not the only sound breaking the peace. Occasionally a distant squawk would penetrate the silence, and if he was quick enough he might catch the source in something gliding out over the ocean. It was to investigate these creatures - that he had dubbed barkbirds - and test a hypothesis connecting them to this ecosystem that had brought him to this tree top.

The inner rim of the plateau opened down to the hollow interior of the tree. In there was an entire living world bustling with activity. The main source of the activity, as he had observed closely over many days, were the barkfish that hatched regularly and frequently from the inner wall of the trunk. Now with his view from the top he could see a number of the creatures occupying the canopy as well, flopping their way across the branches or drying themselves on the broad leaves in the morning sun. One in particular caught his attention, resting alone at the far edge of the canopy, and he shuffled his way across the branch to take a closer look. It was evidently still alive, its tail and fins sporadically twitching with some vigour. An instinct within him felt the urge to help it, to moisten its hide and prevent it desiccating in the hot sun, but a more rational part told him it was probably, for all he knew, exactly where it needed to be. Nor did its predicament seem to have done it much harm. There was no way to know how long it had been there, but it had grown larger than the others still moving themselves into position, its skin a delicate shade of red, crisp and smooth like satin - though he restrained himself from touching it. Crouching down, he watched it for several minutes - its toothless mouth opening and closing and occasionally emitting a soft whistle, an airsack beneath its flukes expanding and contracting rhythmically, five glistening mounds near one rim, which he imagined were its eyes, holding his gaze.

Then it began to flap more violently, concerting its movement in such a way as to bring it closer to the outer edge of the canopy. He was not sure if his presence had disturbed it or was merely coincidental with a natural change in its behaviour. As it neared the edge the urgency of its motion subsided, but it continued to inch ever closer until it slid off the leaf and fell, issuing several loud cries as it did. He rushed across and looked down in time to see it stretch out and arc into a graceful glide long before it would otherwise have hit the water. It levelled off, flapping its flukes as if swimming through the air and even started gaining height as it drifted slowly out of sight, joining several of its kin that he could just make out in the distance.

That confirmed his first hypothesis - the barkfish and barkbirds, which he had previously observed inhabiting respectively the waters and the skies around the treeisland, were not merely related. They were the same animal. Now he wanted to find out what kind of animal they were, and he had a suspicion about that as well.

Returning to the rim of the deep well that was the hollow inner world of the treeisland he secured one end of a length of rope sufficient to reach the bottom, and threw the other end into the hole. Then he abseiled down a short distance to where eggsacs of the creatures were just becoming visible as translucent pimples on the inner surface. Cutting deeply into the bark to ensure a clean excision he removed the egg in as intact a state as he could. Pink sap oozed from the lesion he had made and trickled down the trunk. Through the wall of the egg he could see the tiny embryo squirming. There was, he noticed, no clear demarcation between the egg and the surrounding bark of the tree - rather the egg seemed to simply emerge from the trunk directly. In the previous days of observation he had not seen any sign of the eggs being laid. He was well aware that this might simply have been an observational failure on his part. Perhaps the laying of the eggs was seasonal, or the layers small and unnoticeable, or the process subtle in some other ways. But there was another possibility he was keen to investigate.

Inside the egg the little creature's movements became gradually less vigorous, and eventually it fell limp altogether even as its nestmates still attached to the bark continued twitching and thrashing. He felt a small pang of guilt at having sacrificed this being's life in the pursuit of understanding, but if he was honest he had expected it to be that way. The eggs were not self contained units simply laid on the surface, using the tree as a place to sit while they gestated. Rather they were intimately connected to it, drawing from it the energies and materials of life. There were several explanations for how this might be the case, but one had occurred to him while studying the pig-cacti and hair-melons along the coastal cliffs, and even his observation of the kenthoni themselves suggested it. Every animate creature in this ecosystem was associated with a sessile plant body, and the association was not merely incidental. The conclusion his studies were rapidly converging to was that the animate organisms of this world grew directly from the vegetation, like fruit. These were not animals at all but simply a part of the lifecycle of the plants. Indeed the only true animal on this entire planet was very likely himself.

Ordinarily this may have been too great a leap to make given the limited observations it was based on, but he knew it was not without precedent. In fact, among those planets harbouring multicellular life, those on which fauna constituted a separate kingdom were in the minority. He recalled the latest numbers he had become aware of from the case of the Milky Way, his home galaxy, and he assumed similar ratios probably applied across the cosmos. In the Milky Way, in his own time, around ninety thousand planets were known to have undergone independent abiogenesis, the spontaneous generation of the living from the non-living. It was a small number when one considered the tens of billions of worlds that had been surveyed to establish that figure. Of those ninety thousand life producing worlds, barely one hundred and fifty had forms of life more complex than jellyfish. And of those, fewer than sixty, including Earth, had evolved animals with a central nervous system and a capacity for real-time information processing. The rest were dominated to the exclusion of all else by analogues of plants and fungi, characterised by direct manufacture of nutrients from the light of their parent sun by a process of photosynthesis or its equivalent, or by simple absorption of surplus nutrients. On a handful of those worlds dominated by vegetation evolution had taken a further twist, some of the plants developing the equivalent of a simple nervous system as part of their reproductive cycle - a kind of animated seed to aid in wider dispersal of their kind across the land.

Every instance of a living world had been found to be unique in some respect, the varieties of form and function, the paths of evolutionary history, the ways of being alive and the capacity of nature to explore each of those options seemingly inexhaustible. Some were so strange they would have been thought impossible had they not actually been discovered. On one planet he knew of, the natural ecosystem had managed to cover its entire surface, land and sea and pole to pole, with a layer of impenetrable biomass over a kilometre deep. On another, as it happened the first instance of non-terrestrial multicellular life ever described, the pathways of evolution seemed to lack the predator and prey arms races that had always been thought necessary for any degree of complexity. Instead the history of that world appeared to have been driven by a series of natural catastrophes, timed with almost unnatural precision to emulate many of the effects of just that sort of feedback. Possible comparison with the circumstances on Lune were evident.

Yet for all the differences there were also profound similarities that looked to be universal. In every case, complex or simple, it was the chemistry of carbon suspended in liquid water that was the basis of life. That chemical basis alone could be honed by evolution into machinery similar, though rarely identical, to DNA replication. Moreover it was accepted, on purely theoretical grounds, that this was far and away the most likely path for life to take, unlikely though it was in absolute terms. Only carbon had the precise set of properties needed to carry matter along the twisted path from simple chemistry to complex biology. It was from this knowledge, more so than by any direct observation he was able to make, that he felt confident assuming the material basis of Lune's biology was similar to his own. There were reports of planets on which elemental life-like processes - rudimentary replication and metabolism - had arisen with silicon as the principal chemical element, but never had these reached the complexity of even a bacterium, much less exceeded it, and even those basic feats had been achieved in silicon only under regimes of pressure and temperature that he could not survive. This planet certainly was not one of those.

The big difference for him now was that, for the first time, he was in a position to study the life of another world directly for himself. In every other case the facts were known to him only through study at third or fourth hand. That had mostly been in the Citadel of Orion - the only place he had lived with any real access to that kind of information - by consulting with experts in the science who occupied the vast libraries of that world, by viewing documentaries that had been assembled from snippets filtering in from the borders of human expansion, by reading books. But no amount of study or number of consultants would be enough to give him what he needed here. There were no books for this.

He wanted to collect more samples from the microcosm of the treeisland's interior. He wanted to take samples of the kenthoni wasps as well, but there was a much deeper moral concern in that case. The kenthoni were showing more and more signs of true sentience, and that conferred on him a moral duty greater than what was at play among the simpler organisms of the treeisland. He lowered himself deeper into the hollow of the tree, down to where those barkfish not able to fly off were destined to end up, to where the air became rank with strange perfumes at even higher concentrations than the planet's normal atmosphere, to where the meagre light filtering from above and from numerous holes in the side had to be supplemented by the phosphorescent glow from bulbous growths lining the inside wall. It was a sample of those glowing growths he wanted to collect, to ascertain if they, too, were part of the tree or parasites that had happened to alight there. But now, as he descended further, as daylight from the outside rapidly faded to black with the start of the noon darkening, they became the only source of light. The whole place was filled with an eerie blue glow casting obscene shadows and glinting off the slimy walls. Now the cries of falling barkfish and other ambient sounds echoing through the chamber became all the more ominous. Now the sickly sweet stench in the air started to become overwhelming. In trace amounts, he thought, that smell might not have been unpleasant - but these were far from trace amounts, and now they were simply nauseating. All he wanted to do was get what he had come for and get out.

He rappelled down to a glowing ring several meters from the bottom where the pooled barkfish formed a seething cauldron of continuous activity. Bracing himself against the side and satisfying himself that the protrusions would support his weight, he unhitched from the rope, the better to reach a clump of small growths that would make suitable samples. To position himself properly he needed to step across a wide gap, but at the most inopportune point in the step he was struck from above with considerable force by the slimy mass of a falling barkfish, simultaneous with a blood curdling screech right into his face. The brief instant of startled reflex was enough to cause a crucial misstep. Vainly grasping for anything to arrest the fall, he found himself an instant later entirely submerged in a quagmire of slimy writhing bodies. Panic and disgust hit in equal measure. There might also have been a hint of annoyance at being in the one place he had sought to avoid, but it was more than overwhelmed by the realisation that the weight of his tool belt was dragging him into depths that were not known other than being certainly over his head, and that his face mask would not serve as a breathing device underwater, let alone whatever else was in this cesspit. To make matters worse, in the dark and engulfed in writhing organisms, he was quickly becoming disoriented. He thrashed violently, joining briefly the throng of creatures surrounding him, and after what felt like a terrifying eternity managed to break the surface. Forcing his mind into a moment of calm he grabbed at the sides of the well, but found only enough grip to keep from slipping back into the depths. As if none of that was enough, he was now having difficulty breathing through the mask. In a desperate gamble he spat the mouthpiece out and pulled the rest of it from his nose, leaving it hanging around his neck. The stink of rank air, no longer muffled by the mask, assaulted his nostrils making him gag, and he had to fight to keep murky, foul tasting water from anywhere near the back of his throat, but to his surprise he found he could otherwise breathe normally - though there was no telling how long that would last.

With a hundred slobbering mouths sucking and smacking at his skin and clothes, with every breath making him want to retch, he allowed himself the briefest of moments to calm right down and assess the situation. He knew he was in deep trouble. In the dim light he could see the rope hanging down by the side of the well, the end just out of reach. Every attempt to stretch up towards it only made him sink deeper into the churning murk. He remembered there was a single hook left along with the hammer on his tool belt, and he was now grateful he'd not had the presence of mind to release it a moment earlier when it was dragging him under. With some effort he managed to pound the hook into the bark far enough under the surface to provide a rest for one foot, smashing several barkfish in the process and spilling their insides into the muck around him, before inadvertently letting the hammer slip from his fingers and into the dark depths. Even with that support he tried and failed several times to reach the rope, every attempt bringing him closer to the exhaustion and muscle fatigue he knew was to be avoided if he was to keep any gains he made. It was only by digging IceNeedle into the bark and hoisting against it that he was able to gain the few additional inches needed to take hold of the knotted end of the rope. By the greatest of good fortune the putrid water of the pool, which by first impressions felt slippery with concentrated organic slime, held just enough grit to provide purchase on the rope, allowing him to pull up and latch himself to it.

In spite of an overwhelming need to be out of that hole he hung panting for several minutes before retrieving IceNeedle and starting to slowly winch his way upwards. Before he had reached half way his vision of the dim world around him began to distort and darken even further, and the intermittent ambient sounds faded into a continuous ringing in his ears. He felt dizzy and faint. It took only a moment of uncertainty, of questioning why this might be happening after his escape from so toxic a place, for an explanation to present itself. Ironically the very thing that had enabled him to survive that ordeal and had given him the energy to escape from it was now killing him. He quickly returned the mask to his nose and mouth, ignoring its uncharacteristically disgusting taste. The symptoms dissipated almost immediately.

Back inside the tunnel he took time to contemplate the day's events. He felt lucky, far luckier than he deserved to be, and it was not a feeling that sat well with him. There were so many ways that particular mishap could have been much worse than it was - worse in ways over which he had no control. Disastrously worse. Fatally worse. The oxygen near the pool may have been displaced entirely, not just enough to breathe, or the gases displacing it may have been toxic rather than just smelly, or the pool itself might have been digestive, or the barkfish in those concentrations might have been venomous - or carnivorous. Or he may simply have become permanently trapped there, doomed to a hellish death by an inability to find any means of extraction. He did not want to think on such things, but he knew he should. If he was to survive in this foreign land he could not push the reliance on good fortune too far, as he had done that day. He was paying a price for it though. The allergic rash, which he had all but acclimatised to after the first week of outside excursions, now covered him from face to foot.

-Day 4002

"Friday, February 12, 11: Morning. I have some thoughts on how to better communicate with the kenthoni. Today I will put them to the test."

The plan involved using a series of flashcards and an erasable slate board, that he had spend some time designing and fabricating in the days prior, to introduce the kenthoni to depictions of objects in a range of descriptive styles from simple pictorial, through stylised to abstract, and try to assess their response and level of comprehension. He was convinced they were a highly visually oriented species with an advanced vision based language of their own, and he was keen to discover how malleable it was. Or indeed how adaptable his own thought process might be in accommodating theirs. He felt that even he - stranger though he was in this new land - was learning how to understand the process of their thinking. It had not escaped his notice that, unlike humans whose minds were enclosed in a bony skull, the mind of a kenthoni was open for all to see - even him. Their whole system of interaction and communication was based on a kind of telepathy - not the spurious kind that utilised mysterious forces, but the kind that required little more than simply watching a peer as a thought was formed in their mind. He had wondered if this natural ability might have given them a significant edge when developing the technology to become a spacefaring race. How, he had also wondered, did that make his own race appear by comparison - hidden and secretive and unworthy of trust? Perhaps this explained the hostility he had experienced beyond the south gate, now blocked so completely from the outside that he had not been able to open the airlock even a crack since the last encounter.

The sun was already up when he emerged from the eastern airlock, and he was immediately aware of a concerning change even in the few days since he was there previously. Two new swarms had arrived in that time and were sitting atop mobiles, flanking their three fixed companions on the crest of the hill. Neither was moving and the wasp activity of all five swarms was still sluggish from the night, but it perked up rapidly on his appearance. He had not seen mobile kenthoni in this region before and he could not immediately tell if they were friend or foe, though their presence was not a hopeful sign. He stood for a while waiting to see if their behaviour would betray their intent.

There was a sound nearby, a vibration beneath his feet, familiar but disturbingly out of place here. He swung around, startled. A third mobile beside the long outer wall of the tunnel was moving towards him, its cargo of wasps swarming over it like flies on a rotting carcass. It was close, far too close, and a vanguard of wasps was already slowly extending itself in the direction of the tunnel end. This was not behaviour he was particularly comfortable with under the circumstances, and he felt it might be wise to retreat back into the safety of the airlock and observe from there for the time being. His movement in that direction provoked an immediate response. Within seconds streams of wasps were striking him with considerable cumulative force, pushing him back from his goal. But this attack was different from the others. Small jabs of sharp pain through his clothes and against his exposed skin suggested, to his horror, that some of these wasps were stinging him. With little chance of getting to the door under this onslaught he turned and ran to the shore, using his pack to shield his head and neck, and jumped in without hesitating, immersing himself in the water. Immediately he became entangled in the ubiquitous fine seaweed, and for a tense moment he was concerned it might hold him under. But it proved fragile enough to easily snap free and he was able to stand in neck deep water. Fortunately the attacking wasps, as anticipated, were unwilling to venture even moderately far off shore, but they lined the beach in a dense swarm that waved ominously back and forth in patterns that fairly reeked of ill intent.

As he waited in the shallow surf to see what the next move would be he pulled out a dozen or more small barbs from his chest, shoulders and cheeks. They were fine shards of white crystal, like little needles. Not any part of the wasps' anatomy he had seen before, he could only surmise they had been procured from somewhere to be used as weapons. He fancied he could now see individual wasps passing these weapons among their swarm mates as they patrolled the shoreline in rapidly shifting patterns that, in its bulk activity, remained fixated on him, poised and ready to strike at the first opportunity. It was, however, being disrupted in its rear ranks as Johnny and Bee-Friend from the top of the hill expanded their range towards him, aided, as it seemed, by one of the mobile newcomers which had started rolling down the hill. In the melee that ensued it was difficult to differentiate between the swarms, and the typical ordered harmony that characterised their bulk activity gave way to the kind of chaotic confusion that might have been expected of a large number of disturbed insects. It looked as if he had stumbled into a conflict among these creatures - and was very probably the cause of it - though from his perspective it was difficult to tell if it was a minor disagreement or an all out war.

Shielded as he was by the temporary distraction he took the chance to climb out of the water, and thought once more to make a dash for the tunnels. But the closer he came to the airlock the thicker the concentration of wasps around it became, forming itself into a veritable barrier he could scarcely see through, much less run through. It felt as if all parties in the conflict were in agreement to keep him out of there. Several waves of the creatures began striking him from the side, but more gently now than before, more like the cordial encounters he was accustomed to. Not an attack this time but a guiding nudge, herding him - towards the mobile platform that was now retreating at a modest pace back up the hill. Running as fast as he could up hill while dodging large chunks of sponge grass ripped off in the wake of the vehicle's huge treads, it took some effort to catch up with it without being entirely sure what he was meant to do when he did.

There was no simple way to climb on board the moving structure, but he took a guess that this was the intention, so he leapt onto the lowest of the stepped ascents at its stern end, just managing to grip the edge with his finger tips. He hung for a moment, realising he had little chance to hoist himself up from that position, before a continuous stream of wasps began striking his thighs and buttocks with enough force to help him onto the first landing.

From his vantage now at the rear of the mobile, looking back through a thick haze of swarming wasps he could see the two remaining mobiles begin a pursuit. The caravan passed close to the cores of the three hives he had been studying - been working with in a spirit of mutual understanding - Bee-Haave, Bee-Friend and Johnny-Bee-Good - his ... friends. Johnny was the closest. Largely denuded of wasps as it was he could see the core structure of the hive more clearly now than he ever had before, though still not clearly enough to be able to appreciate the detail. It was, as he had expected, a plant of some kind - like a large squat cactus or densely foliated shrub, a lighter shade of green than its surroundings and spread out over an area of ground. A number of appendages like branches or tufts of thick hair protruded from near the top, curled over the sides and extended into the sponge bed. Though the colour was different its overall appearance reminded him of what he had found at the heart of the Jimitry back on NewEarth years earlier. But while that one had been dead and desiccated and shrivelled up, this one looked much more vital and alive, albeit entirely sessile - firmly rooted to the spongy ground around it and showing neither the means nor the inclination to movement. It occurred to him, now that he was seeing this part of the hive for the first time, that he had never been sure how it and the wasps were related - whether their primary role was to give something to it, extract something from it, or just use it as a convenient place to roost.

As the vehicle moved further away from the three cores the larger bulk of their constituent wasps extended across as a cloud and were travelling with it. It looked as if the four swarms had merged into a large mobile superswarm, with him as its travelling companion. It was a behaviour he had not seen before and had not considered as a possibility.

One of the pursuing vehicles broke off and detoured in the direction of the three hive cores. The man watched in horror as it rode, without any sign of hesitation, right over the top of Bee-Haave, its massive treads easily crushing the smaller, much more delicate and totally defenceless plant. It then turned with slow deliberation towards Johnny and performed the same act of wanton carnage, and then again with Bee-Friend, rolling first over one half of the immobile bush, then coming about to take out the second half. In its wake it left little more than a few clumps of broken bush oozing pink sap, and widely scattered debris. It was unclear to him what he had just witnessed. Was that an act of cold blooded triple murder, the execution of three criminals or simply a ritual that had to be carried out for the sake of etiquette? He knew so little about these beings, he realised. Even what he thought he did know was mostly by analogy with human culture and motivation, and even that, in turn, was nothing other than an extrapolation of his own personal experience.

Several hours of steady travel saw him far out of sight of the coast and further inland on this route than he had been before. There were features of the landscape here new to him, many of which might have warranted closer inspection had the situation allowed it. They passed several large bodies of water which, like the ocean, were filled with dark red sea grass. One even had a treeisland sapling growing near its centre, though it looked small and sickly. But these were not oceans, as he could tell from the visible shoreline enclosing them. They passed outcroppings of blueish black crystal that glinted like obsidian in the sunlight. He had not encountered that before, and he noticed the kenthoni wasps busying themselves gathering surprisingly large chunks of it and dropping them into hoppers around the hull of the vehicle. They crossed over and ran beside trails left by other mobiles - some freshly scarred and broken, some showing varying amounts of regrowth as indicated by lighter shades of green, others fully re-established but still deeply furrowed - as if this was a well travelled transport route. They passed both near and far to other kenthoni hives, some alone and others in groups of three or four or even five. All the while the huge conical spire of the Mountain, fixed to the skyline on the right hand side as they moved forward, at least provided a comforting hint of the familiar. The pursuing mobiles were far enough behind to be out of sight most of the time, but an occasional glimpse of both of them, when terrain favoured seeing that far, was sufficient proof that they were still giving chase.

The passenger was able to work his way around the perimeter of the vehicle unimpeded except by occasional irregularities in its metal surface, but when he tried to approach the centre where the core of the hive was evidently located he was gently but unmistakably pushed away. He was able to confirm that the larger proportion of the upper surface consisted of a deep bed of clay soil topped with a layer of sponge grass, like a moving garden. There was no access he could find to the interior of the thing where, presumably, the drive mechanism and power source, both still mysterious to him, were contained. The whole thing was constantly rumbling and vibrating in a coarse low bass as it moved, and vents along the side exuded frequent puffs of vapour and dribbles of liquid. He also noted that many of the wasps busied themselves constantly picking up scraps of pulverised sponge grass from the ground as they passed, shredding it further with their own bodies and feeding it into openings an the back. The same was done with further supplies of the blue crystal that they passed. Possibly a fuel source, he thought. Beyond that he had no idea how the structure moved. He could see what he took to be the manual controls for accelerating, breaking and steering - long metal bars rotating on a central pivot, like see-saws, permanently attended by collections of wasps that could, by finely coordinated group action, manipulate them with surprising delicacy. Watching them act in this way forced his perceptions to shift almost involuntarily until the whole swarm appeared as a single giant amorphous individual riding a suitably scaled billy cart. When the sky darkened for the hour of the noon eclipse and the activity of the wasps settled down to the bare minimum, the mobile continued to move through the blackness in what he could only hope was a well mapped path. It did not slow its pace through the afternoon as they passed more dozing kenthoni swarms, more giant spinifex forests infested with snare-worms, more crystalline fuel deposits, and an outcropping of white material that looked like snow but clearly, in the heat of the day, was not. It continued into the evening and after sunset, sailing into the night like a ship crossing a moonlit sea.

Through the night the passenger tried to get some sleep, but mostly failed. The vehicle chugged on at a steady clip manned, as it were, by a skeleton crew at the helm while the bulk of the swarm huddled together in apparent stupor. He noticed, as he had on several other occasions, that even in this state individual wasps remained quite active. They did slow down, making them easier to observe, and they did behave more like the dumb insects he was used to, crawling on him aimlessly if he came close only to fly off and crawl somewhere else seemingly at random. It was only some unnamed gestalt property, something in the way they interacted and coordinated their activity as a whole, something lost during hours of darkness, that gave the impression of sentience in daylight.

In the quiet of the night he found himself constructing in his mind a plausible history to the saga in which he was now a player. For a long time he had avoided speculating about what his life here meant, preferring to wait until sufficient facts were at hand to give credence to any speculation. But facts were starting to pile up now, and if he was honest with himself, deep within the recesses of his mind, he'd always had a theory. It was clear this society was embroiled in conflict, and by all appearance it was more than just a difference of opinion between rival individuals. He had arrived in the midst of a civil war - or possibly his arrival had triggered it. It was also clear that this world was not the place of origin of the kenthoni, but a colonial world constructed by the Hosts and twinned with his own terrestrial habitat, set up to reflect the original form of two respective races - like a diorama in a museum - captured at the moment each had become a spacefaring civilisation. They were meant to be together, so the conflict he was unwittingly creating was more widespread than was even apparent at first glance. And there were still larger mysteries here. The kenthoni colony was by some measures the better established of the two and should therefore have been a better representation of that moment in their history. One of only two species known to have attained an interstellar presence was, by nature, rooted to a single place on the ground, and needed a sophisticated piece of technology just to become nomadic. Yet from an alternative perspective even that technology was primitive for a race with cosmic aspirations - rusted and tarnished metal machinery, like something from the steam age.

He wanted to take his speculation deeper into their past, into their evolutionary story where maybe answers could be found.

In human history the understanding of the mind \- of thought and intelligence, of sentience and consciousness and will - was a hard won battle. It had once been thought that mind could not comprehend itself at all - that a mind simple enough to be understood would be too simple to understand anything, and would therefore not deserve to be called a mind. Evolution had somehow managed to construct a mind with the capacity to understand the entire universe from the very smallest particle of matter to superclusters of galaxies, from the very earliest moment of time to its eventual end in cold, diffuse emptiness. Scales of existence that had no bearing on parochial tooth and claw survival and adaptability, the guiding hands by which evolution sculpted its forms, somehow managed to be included in the results. But to evolve a mind able to understand itself, that had always seemed too great a feat to ask. So for much of humanity's push to understand the universe in which it existed, the mind itself was not thought part of that universe. From that error had arisen various forms of superstition and religion and spurious philosophy that had continued to influence human thinking and delay human progress even well into his own early days. That idea had long ago been proven to be untrue, but the human mind had certainly not evolved to understand itself. Indeed it had always been imagined that it could not have evolved to understand itself. Eventually the understanding of mind by mind was achieved, but at the cost of being by something other than evolved humans themselves. Rather, it was the artificial progeny of natural humans, beings with minds designed to think in different ways who had attained that goal. Once done it was a prize that yielded a thousandfold its cost in profit, ushering in a new era which saw the descendants of humankind - and sometimes individual humans, like himself - wend their way among the stars.

Now, watching this kenthoni rider as it slept and dreamt, a new theory occurred to him. Perhaps these creatures had an advantage. Perhaps the kenthoni had achieved what humans had considered impossible - a natural and intuitive understanding of how minds work and how to extend their capabilities. Perhaps that had been their first technology, coming at the start of their study of the universe and their push to seize dominion over it, rather than the end. Perhaps that piece of good fortune had enabled them to reach for the stars at an earlier stage of their evolution.

... Perhaps.

In the end it was all just guesswork.

-Day 4003

By the light of the new day he could see that the landscape they were travelling through had changed. The Mountain was still prominent on the right, crisp and clear in the dawn sun, but the gently undulating hills had flattened out and the ubiquitous cover of sponge grass was gradually becoming patchy, interspersed with large areas of brown dirt. The lush coastal terrain was giving way to desert. The pursuing peregrine kenthoni were still behind and looked like they had gained ground during the night. Of even greater concern, it seemed they had been joined by others, moving together on a parallel course, bringing the total to four that he could see. While there was always a chance he was completely misreading the situation, he could only assume these were not his allies.

Several features of the landscape were beginning to look familiar. Along the horizon to the left and set against the glare of the rising sun, tall fronds growing in an odd assortment of angles indicated an expansive forest of giant spinifex. A single plume of cloud rising from beyond that skyline was the sure sign of a terramine operating in that direction, and in the distance a slender thread extended from the Mountain's broad base and terminated at a point close to where their current route was taking them. They were approaching the southern airlock. Just as they were close enough for him to confirm their position beyond doubt the pace of their travel started to slow, coming to a halt several minutes later with the Southgate entrance still some way off. Somewhat closer, a lone kenthoni swarm began rhythmically expanding towards the mobile superswarm, which reciprocated in turn in what seemed to be a greeting. He recognised this sessile hive as Pocahontas.

The behaviour of the two swarms was changing in ways he had not seen before. Their initial greeting continued like an overly long embrace, forming a long tube thick with countless jostling wasps from both hives. Streams of the buzzing creatures were gently nudging him off the platform and into the heart of the tube, pulsating waves of the insects around him confirming the direction they wanted him to go. From the inside, the walls of the tube were so dense with wasps he could no longer see the sky or the surrounding land, sunlight shining through the mass of dancing bodies forming the most remarkable shadowplay around him. The interior of the elongated swarm hollowed out in front of him while the wasps at his back continued to usher him towards ...

Towards the exposed heart of Pocahontas.

In front of him he could see clearly for the first time the sessile organism forming the core of the hive. It was a squat bush, wider than it was tall though still much taller than himself, firmly fixed to its bed of sponge grass by thick roots that protruded not only directly from its base, but extended from the top and ran down the sides into the ground, as if it needed to be anchored from all possible directions. Fine leaves of vivid bright green that contrasted sharply with the dark ground around it made up the bulk of the visible mass, crisscrossed with curved bands of rounded ridges and deep furrows. It could have been his imagination, but he could not help seeing comparisons with the wrinkled surface of a human brain. Arranged among the ridges, tiny red flowers formed a complex but seemingly orderly pattern of loops and spirals, like tattoos on a sailor. Individual wasps continued to land, pause reverently by one of these flowers as if drawing nourishment from contact with it, and then fly off, though he suspected that activity was at much lower density and slower pace than it normally would have been.

He felt he was part of a ceremony of some kind, and moreover that it was an honour and a privilege to be invited into the inner sanctuary of a hive in this way. But at the back of his mind he could not help but wonder what the motivation behind it was, and whether this should be a concern. Several wasps landed gently on him, on his head and shoulders and arms, sitting motionless for far longer than they ever had before. He in turn chose to keep still as well, letting them, for the time being, do their thing without reacting. Several of the insects descended from somewhere in the throbbing mass above him carrying between them the lifeless body of a single wasp. It was larger than typical - bloated and oddly coloured. They hovered in front of him, their little wings beating furiously to keep their position fixed. Something about their attitude compelled him to raise his hands in a gesture of acceptance of the gift, to which they responded by placing the body softly on his palms. It was not quite as dead as he had thought at first, its legs and wings twitching slowly but strongly as it lay there, tickling his fingers. Then more wasps came in from several sides, landing on his arms and wrists, or hovering nearby, or toying with their abeyant comrade as it rested on his hands. Some of them were carrying strands of fibre, or bits and pieces of dried leaves or small twigs. Some came in with larger slabs of bark and even some rectangular strips of metal. Still others carried small worms. They set to work boxing the body of their prone companion in a cocoon woven with remarkable dexterity and bound with sticky silk extruded by the worms. They worked so fast and so expertly that he could scarcely see the details of what they were doing, but could only watch in amazement, mystified at this odd behaviour and not daring to flinch.

Then, suddenly, apparently satisfied that their task was complete, the nearby wasps departed, leaving him holding the tightly wrapped parcel in his hands.

"Thank you," he said out loud, rather ludicrously but having no clue what he was meant to do with this thing or what to do next. As if cued to the sound of his voice the entire swarm around him dispersed, one side back to his former travelling companion mounted on the mobile, the other back to Pocahontas rooted to the ground where many of the creatures began pushing him away as if dismissing him from their presence. In the open air again he could see that the four approaching mobiles were considerably closer and continuing to advance. He carefully tucked the package he was holding into an empty pouch on his tool belt normally used for collecting samples, thinking it might be prudent now to make a run for the airlock. But his mobile ally seemed to be engaged in a new activity and he found himself compelled to wait and see what it was. A number of wasps were gathering bits of dried vegetation into a growing heap on the spongy ground, while the rest of the swarm waved up and down in a particularly strong abstract pattern that it kept repeating over and over. Meanwhile Pocahontas had ceased almost all activity, the entire swarm collapsing against the core of its hive in a tight mottled mound. It appeared to have gone into a state more akin to coma than the sleep-like condition of even the darkest hours of night. Then several wasps left off tending the pile of detritus and started up in a behaviour that he found not only unprecedented but rather disturbing. They began diving towards the pile and colliding with each other in pairs with such force that each of the pair was left momentarily stunned on the ground. At each collision he heard a pronounced click that seemed inconsistent with their soft bodies, until he realised that each was carrying with it a pebble or a shard of stone. It was only when he saw a small shower of sparks result from one collision that it dawned on him, simultaneously with a markedly increased shock, what was going on.

"That can't possibly be a good idea," he said, voicing aloud his initial mental response. But with the advancing enemy almost on them he could see a logic to it that was difficult to resist, and as always he needed to remember that his own instincts were less to be trusted than local knowledge. He pulled the old tinder box from his tool belt and hesitated, just for a moment, weighing up one last time whether he should be assisting or protesting this course of action. The choice was confirmed when he noticed that the motif adorning the front of the tinder box was very similar to the pattern forming and reforming within the kenthoni swarm as it hovered nearby.

He had suspected from the first that the air of this world was heavier in oxygen by both pressure and proportion than what was normal for him. Even so he was surprised at how easily the fire started and how quickly it spread. Within seconds the pile of debris was alight, crackling loudly and violently, throwing sparks off bright orange flame. When it reached the sponge grass it appeared to slacken briefly, sputtering against what might have seemed unpromisingly succulent fuel, but it quickly took hold, burning the live grass even more brightly than the dead sticks, and spreading out in all directions like touch paper. He had only seconds to respond before it engulfed him, sprinting for all his worth in the direction of the airlock and the closest patch of dead ground. Even so he could feel the heat of the flame at the back of his neck as it threatened to outpace him. Only when he had reached the safety of what he assumed was flame resistant clay soil, and some way beyond even that, did he stop to survey the damage he had caused. The whole landscape where he had been standing only moments before was ablaze in a wall of flame and smoke he could not see beyond. What he could see horrified him. Pocahontas, the helplessly sessile kenthoni that had given him, an alien stranger, aid when he needed it, was now immersed in flame - and by his own hand no less. The bulk of the swarm still clung tight around the core mass - perhaps as a form of protection - scarcely moving, though bright airborn embers flying off he took to be individual wasps instinctively trying to escape the inferno. He wondered if it could feel pain as he understood the concept - and hoped against hope that it could not. The only consoling thought he had to absolve the guilt and remorse he felt at that moment was to recall that, even on Earth, there were many species of plant that utilised the natural occurrence of bushfire to close their life cycle. Perhaps here, where fire might be expected to be even more natural, it was not such a big deal.

That thought was given the lie a moment later when the sound of an explosion drew his attention to the closest of the four mobile kenthoni that had previously been hunting him, but were now making a hasty retreat. While three of them had disappeared behind the wall of flame to an unknown fate, the fourth had been caught in too tight a turn to retreat with any speed. The fire, having engulfed it, had burst one side of the metal hull, spilling its mechanical guts - cams and gears and drive shafts and, it would seem, some portion of its especially flammable fuel supply \- into the surrounding furnace. The resulting blast had ripped apart what remained of that side of the vehicle, overbalancing it and sending the whole thing crashing down, its living occupant rolling helplessly onto flame strewn ground. Oddly, he felt every bit as much shame and guilt at the destruction of this enemy as he had for his friend.

On the other hand he found one source of joy to see that his erstwhile travel mate had escaped to dry dirt and was, even as he watched, trundling to the west at a moderate clip. He, too, wanted nothing so much as to be away from this expanding scene of carnage, and set off jogging in the direction of the SouthGate. The airlock was still barred by beams and trusses braced firmly against the door, but with some effort he was able to free enough of them to open the hatch and get inside, though not before facing one last look at the blaze he had started. In just those minutes it had reached the spinifex forest where it had grown into a firestorm lapping at the sky itself with such ferocity he could hear it as a distant roar. It was with palpable relief that he closed the airlock hatch, removed the face mask and started breathing his own air again. He allowed himself only a moment or two to settle down before setting off along the corridor. In the first instance he wanted to get back to the EastGate and determine what damage had been wrought there by the events of the last few days. After that, he had no idea.

-Day 4004

He had made it to the nearest rest stop before night fell through the tunnel window and, after breaking the imposed two day fast and washing himself in the constantly running stream of fresh water, had collapsed in belated physical and mental exhaustion. Though sleep during the night was intermittent it was enough to make him feel refreshed and ready to set out by the time the first light of the sun appeared the next morning. But even that level of respite proved short lived.

The light through the windows was being partially blocked by wasps swarming against it. That in itself was not unusual and would not normally have been a concern - they had frequently been caught studying him along this and other sections of corridor - but this time their behaviour was more threatening. They were running at the window, colliding with it at speed and with the same focus and determination he had seen during other attacks. He might have thought this an empty display, but he was not willing to risk the alternative possibility - that they knew what they were doing, and that their intentions were not beneficent. He started running, not wanting to panic just yet or to overexert himself, but he would feel safer nearer to the Mountain where they were less likely to venture. Then, perhaps, they would be inclined to forget him.

Somewhere behind was a sound he had not heard before - a faint whine like a low pitched whistle - and a light breeze bristled the back of his neck. Something about a breeze inside the tunnel felt immediately wrong, but there was no time to work out what it was. Noise and breeze escalated quickly and within seconds he was being pushed forward by a roaring hurricane. He knew straight away what that meant - the tunnel had been breached. Somehow the attacking wasps had managed to slice their way through the tough material of the windows, and the thought of a hostile swarm in possession of slicing tools now invading his sanctuary was not a pleasant one.

It only took a minute or two for the pressure difference to even out and the gale it had generated to die down, but now the sound of the wind through the tunnel was replace by a new one - the buzz of countless wings coming up behind. He did not waste time looking back to confirm what he already knew, running instead at full sprint while simultaneously fitting the mask over his mouth and nose. The first wave came as the creatures began hitting his back, then as they continued to out pace him attacks came from the sides, targeting his face and striking with substantial force. Instinctively he raised a hand to protect his face and eyes and to swat them away like annoying flies. Stinging pain at the back of his head and neck suggested that the attack was being ramped up by the deployment of cutting and piercing weapons. It was only with distracted concern that he noticed the blood on his hands this first wave had already drawn. Mercifully it eased off again with the noon eclipse, giving him the chance to forge ahead at the expense of running blind.

The end of the eclipse coincided with him reaching the fabricator node. The muscles of his legs ached with fatigue, but to his surprise and dismay he could still hear the swarm in pursuit. By sheer good luck masquerading as foresight he had, early on, manufactured several spare bicycles that were lying around in the fabricator, quite functional and ready for use. Without that he would have no chance of outrunning a kenthoni swarm intent on chasing him down this close to the Mountain and this far from its core hive. Even with it this would be a tight race. He grabbed the nearest of the spare bicycles and mounted it without pausing.

The situation now called for a major change of plan. His time here was done - he needed to get off this planet altogether, and as fast as possible. Turning the bike down the western branch of the tunnel he pedalled as hard as he could towards the cannon bunker, trying his best to ignore the cramping pain in his calves and thighs. Fatigue was sapping his strength even before the long trek had begun, and there would be little opportunity to rest. A thought came to him. It carried some risk but at this point, he knew, every move was a risk. He pulled the mask from his mouth and took three deep breaths before replacing it. The plan seemed to work, a palpable boost of power washing over him providing a refreshing second wind. Only then did he venture a glance back to confirm that the tunnel was thick with wasps pacing him at every step. Even through his fear about their overtly hostile intentions towards him, he could not but admire their persistence.

As the afternoon wore on even the occasional gulps of concentrated oxygen were failing to stave off growing muscle fatigue and exhaustion. His joints were burning and his chest ached from hard breathing. The kenthoni swarm, on the other hand, appeared to have tapped reserves of energy and resolve he would not have suspected they possessed. They seemed to be aware that their quarry had a viable escape route and were redoubling their efforts to overtake him before the opportunity was lost. With the tunnel end and the breech of the cannon now in sight they finally closed the gap. He fell from the bike and stumbled to his feet as dozens of tiny jabs and strikes tore at his clothes and opened shallow lacerations on his exposed skin. Attempts to parry the attack only served to provide more avenues to launch a fresh offensive. He made a final desperate dash across the last tens of meters and vaulted into the tank of fluid, submerging himself entirely.

There had been no opportunity to prepare himself for this physically or mentally, but he had no choice but to chance it. Through the blurry surface, red tinged with his own blood, hundreds of dancing shadows hovered, waiting for him to emerge so they could finish him off. He wondered if they were aware, either individually or collectively, that it was not going to happen. He forced the oxygen rich liquid into his lungs, enduring the involuntary symptoms it produced and letting them subside. Then he curled himself into the transparent cannon shell like a foetus in a womb and waited.

The contrast between the intensity of the previous hours, culminating as it did in a typically dramatic cannonball launch, and the serenity that followed as the capsule rose silently into the darkness, was particularly stark. He felt almost comfortable, floating in his tiny bubble of amniotic fluid, sustaining and protecting him as he returned to the place where he was not the alien. On one side the face of Lune that filled most of his field of view was sliding into night despite the fact that the sun, tinted an eerie pink by his own blood as it trickled from still open wounds, was rising further above the deeply curved western horizon. On the darkening surface below he could see where the fire - that he himself had started with a single spark - continued to burn a crimson edge around the vast blackened area it had already consumed. On the other side the half phase of NewEarth, to which he was now headed with all the inevitability the laws of physics would allow, hung like a welcoming grin.

By the time the two orbs looked to be the same size and could be seen at a single glance, he had moved far enough to the east over NewEarth that he could see, for the first time, the coast of the Great Continent where he had first arrived all those years before. The face of the globe was by then full and bright, in contrast with the thin crescent that Lune was showing, and, other than a scattering of cloud across the continent's interior and over the great ocean to the north, offered a near perfect view of the surface. Though he could make out little detail he knew that somewhere there was the rocky range surrounding Bear Hill where he was almost torn apart in a grizzly attack, and the sprawling web of the Jimitry. He fancied he could see the green plain of Homestead Bend, run through with the meandering course of the Swift River, where he had build his first cottage and farmed the land. He hoped the cottage was still there and felt a longing, perhaps one day, to visit it once more. He could clearly see the line of the eastern coast, the forest and mountains to the north and the sandy dunes to the south separated by the delta of the river as it drained into the sea. And he could see just far enough beyond the coast to finally answer the question of what lay there. The answer, as it turned out, was not much other than some small islands in a broad expanse of blue water.

The crescent of Lune narrowed bit by bit until it vanished entirely as the sun disappeared behind, casting a huge arching shadow over NewEarth's western hemisphere, affording him a unique glimpse of a simultaneous solar and lunar eclipse, before plunging his whole universe into empty, lonely blackness. It emerged again to cast the expanding vista of NewEarth in brilliant daylight, just in time for a final look before re-entry.

-Day 4008

"Thursday, February 18, 11: Morning. I've had the strangest thought about what this thing is and what I'm supposed to do with it."

The note was accompanied by a sketch of the object that was sitting on the desk in front of him as he wrote it.

The days since his return had been spent in recuperation, allowing his cut and bruised body the opportunity to start healing. The injuries he had sustained in the last frantic hours on Lune had been more extensive than he had realised at the time. The kenthoni wasps had meant business, slicing through his clothes and into the flesh of his back and legs as well as the exposed areas of his face and hands, and stabbing him with needles of sharpened stone, many of which he had found still embedded in his scalp and shoulders. Fortunately, though extensive, those wounds were mainly superficial, most only drawing a trickle of blood and all missing major arteries. He could not yet bring himself to conclude that this happy fact was the result of good intention rather than simple good luck. The truth was that, for whatever reason, some part of the intelligent population of that planet had regarded him as their enemy and had wanted to cause him serious harm. At the very least they had wanted to drive him from their world, at which task they had succeeded. It didn't matter that he had also found allies among them. It didn't matter that he had learnt a great deal during the time on Lune. His mood for much of the time during those first days following his return were mired in a haze of self doubt and reproach that on occasions came dangerously close to loathing. He had been entrusted with a single great purpose - sent across the gulf that separates not just worlds but whole galaxies as the representative of humanity to a new race of beings. But that task had ended in failure - despised by the very beings he had been sent to connect with, and abandoned by the ones who had sent him. In the better moments he wondered if, maybe, at some time in the future, he might be able to return and make reparation for the damage he had done, but mostly that seemed like a forlorn hope. He was alone again with no idea what the next phase of his life would be, or even if there was one.

He also occupied himself during that time re-writing, as best he could remember, everything that had transpired in the previous weeks. The journals he had kept and the notes he had taken at the time were all lost to him now and it was by no means clear there would ever be the opportunity to collect them. The journals, then, became a way of distracting his mind from those depressions and to find focus in something that, just maybe, would recover value from the failed mission. It was only when he had reached that chapter of the narrative describing the overland journey to South Gate, and the ritual that had taken place there, that he recalled the strange gift he had been presented with - and that it was still in his possession. He took it out and, for the first time, examined it closely.

It was still thoroughly intact, apparently none the worse for wear for having spent six hours submerged in oxygenated fluid during a transit between worlds, to say nothing of being thrown about for hours before that and ignored for days since. It was a neat little box with one roughly square cross section and elongated in the others, held taut and rigid by unseen internal structure but otherwise looking like a cocoon that might have been spun by a rather large caterpillar. Shaking it gently and holding it up to the light revealed nothing of what was inside, though he knew it contained a kenthoni wasp because he had seen it being placed there. In his mind a number of associated concepts were, only semi-consciously, coming together until finally resolving themselves into an inkling of what it was and why it was given to him.

Armed with the gift and a breathing mask he rode the monorail to the heart of the Octopus. The landscape within its transparent domes and pipes now took on an entirely fresh aspect - the dark sponge lawn ground and heavy air had become familiar and appropriate. Only when he had reached the centre of the main hub and knelt on the soft ground with the gift in his hands did he hesitate, realising suddenly that he was still unsure what to do. At first he placed the package on the ground and waited, but nothing happened and something - he was not sure what - told him that wasn't quite right. Searching the outer casing for a weak spot he began carefully to unwrap it. The fibrous material was tough, but did seem to peel back in some directions more easily than others, layer by layer, like a banana. Remarkably, the creature that had been so snugly encased inside was still vital, and when exposed to the air began stretching itself out and waving its wings and tiny legs. He placed it on the ground without the packaging and at once it reoriented itself and commenced scratching at the ground with its legs. It continued scratching with increasing vigour for many minutes as he watched, fascinated, until it had dug itself into a hole deeper than its own width. Then it appeared to slow down until eventually only the occasional weak twitch of a wing could be seen.

It was then that his attention was drawn to the discarded packaging that he was still holding. Most of it consisted of fine strands of silk intertwined with assorted bits of dried vegetation and the odd shard of stone to lend support to the structure. But there were also two strips of rigid metal, having formed two sides of the box, that looked decidedly out of place - not only in the context of the other stuff comprising the package, but with almost everything else he had seen during his time on Lune outside of the artificial environment of the tunnels. Now that he was holding them he could well remember that they were carried in with some pomp. They were smooth and new and finely crafted, with neat but irregular notches running down either side. In fact they looked very similar to the orrery key he carried on his tool belt.

It was late in the afternoon when he reached Station Ten, and by the time he had traversed the distance to the Observatory it was a cloudless, starless night with the final dregs of sunset fading on the western horizon and the gibbous face of Lune shining brightly overhead. He activated the telescope and turned its attention first directly upwards, the familiar view taking on a whole new dimension now through the eyes of a former inhabitant. Some clouds drifted around the base of the Mountain, light and patchy enough to afford good and frequent glimpses of the surface beneath. He could see the coastal zone to the east where most of his study of the kenthoni swarms had been carried out. He could see the vast dark red oceans pocked with tiny dots that he now knew were treeislands. With the magnification at its highest he was sure he could make out the slender straight threads of the tunnels pushing out from the Mountain to the south, to the east along the coast and to the north west into the sea, and was surprised at how far they appeared to extend seen from that perspective. And he could see the large tracts of land to the south of the Mountain blackened and burnt by the fire, but was both amazed and delighted to see signs of fresh green growth returning even after those few days.

Remembering what he had come for he took out the two new keys and inserted, first one which did not fit, then the other which did, into the remaining key hole, and slowly moved the slider control next to it. Immediately the view of the world through the telescope dome started to change, subtly at first but unmistakably. The colours were shifting - the dark greens and reds that dominated the face of Lune became bluer and brighter, ironically making it appear more natural, the rusty brown deserts turned yellow and those small regions of ocean that were previously blue became black, like wide holes punched into the planet. He pulled back the magnification until the scene around him had reduced down to its normal scale. Now the distant horizon on one side and the City skyline on the other, that had previously been black against the night sky, became faintly visible as a dull red glow.

He inched the slider to the right. Suddenly the sky was suffuse with points of light, faint and red at first but becoming brighter and whiter and more numerous as he adjusted the controls further. Not just a few but, so it appeared, in the tens of thousands - spread right across the sky, though thicker in a wide band that stretched from north east to south west.

The stars. They had been there, unseen, the whole time.

Some were prominent and singular, others fainter and more densely packed, still others smeared into the background by the thousands like dust in the wind. Some were grouped into asterisms or larger constellations, and immediately his mind began to see meaning in the way they were arranged - a long stemmed rose here, over there a whale chasing a school of fish and, just rising above the City spire ... a pair of scissors. He knew well enough that there was no reality behind those appearances other than what his mind was creating to connect his own existence with the random patterns in the sky. Every time he had beheld a new starry vista from a new place, and there had been several such times during his long life, he had found a new set of constellations to bring some order to it - either handed down by the culture and history of a new home or made up by himself for his own amusement.

But there was more here. There was an order that was deeper than what could be explained by his own imagination \- patterns that were objectively real. Adjusting the magnification of the telescope he drew closer to several of the stars - a bright one here, a fuzzy one there, a small cluster somewhere else. Almost all of them carried the signs - there was no mistaking it. Some resolved into rings or strings of stars like pearls on a necklace - eight or ten or a dozen forming a neat little row, or an arc, or an ellipse or perfect circle without a single one out of place. Others appeared as orbs or disks with blurred edges and textured faces that played with the light like jewels set against the blackness of space. He knew what these things represented - he had seen it before, even in the Milky Way. This sky, these stars, were an artefact. Not false - that would imply deception. It was not a deception. Real stars in a real sky. But these stars had been caged, subdued, perhaps even torn apart by the machinations of mind so that their natural tendency to flagrant waste was brought to heel. Visible now only through the unavoidable trickle of energy they spat out, and only by instruments sensitive enough to pick it up. In the Milky Way only a fraction of the stars had been tamed in that way by the descendants of humanity. Here it was virtually all of them. Like lamps doused by a thrifty householder to save fuel, the stars in this galaxy had been turned off. By this means the Hosts - most likely descendants of the kenthoni swarms he had recently engaged with - had constructed a civilisation that might survive a span of time greater than the present age of the universe and still think itself young. And they had built one such civilisation - at least one - for nearly every star in the galaxy. Among the few exceptions were, it seemed, the kenthoni home system which he had seen, though distant, by its natural light, and the nearby star he had come to call his own sun, left alone perhaps for no other purpose than to make him feel at home.

So this, he thought, was what the universe looked like under intelligent control. This was engineering on a colossal scale - a whole galaxy renovated, its matter transformed entirely from the natural to the artificial. In this state it could exist for a length of time which, to a small mind like his, was indistinguishable from eternity, and provide life and purpose to unimaginable multitudes of sentient beings for all of it. Everything he could see now, and the whole history of the universe before that, was little more than the first instant of what was to come. This was what the Philosopher Lords of his own day had spoken of in hushed tones as the ultimate end and the true fate of all things.

This was Omega.

It was magnificent to behold. It was mind expanding to contemplate the scope and scale of what was being attempted and what had been achieved. It was ... pure hubris. To suppose that a mere particle of matter, issued from the lowliest levels of the universe, could drag itself out of the slime and wrest authority over all of creation, to become as the very Gods themselves. It was a moral abomination. And for such presumption there would be a cost - a billion stars stripped to the core and brought to their knees, yoked by new masters for a purpose they were never meant to have. A universe that had to be destroyed to bring it into everlasting life. He had now caught a glimpse both of the true face of Omega, the divine plan for the future of all things, and of the price that was to be paid for it, and he was not sure which terrified him most. He could take no more of the spectacle surrounding him, at once so awesome and so awful. He turned down the spectral filter so that once more he was seeing the world with his own unaided eyes, and one by one the stars faded to blackness.

-Day 4010

There was one key left whose purpose was unknown and, so far as he knew, one mechanism needing a key he had not previously possessed. Though the connection was by no means certain, it was worth testing. Taking the monorail to Station Fourteen he continued on foot, picking his way through a complex array of functionless structures by only the vaguest recollection of the proper path. He had only been to this part of the City once before and for a while it seemed he might have lost the way, but he knew what he was looking for. It was the one place that he had always felt had a purpose which he had not yet figured out. For a long time he had pushed it to the back of his mind, content to be dealing with other issues. Eventually he emerged into the courtyard centred on the bulbous tower of the Henge.

The circular room at the top of the stairs was just as he remembered it, and it still offered no hint to what it was. He selected one of the twelve control plinths entirely arbitrarily and stepped over to it. Hesitating only briefly as if to make a final guess as to what would happen and deciding not to bother, he inserted the final unlabelled key into the slot and twisted it. It did fit with satisfying ease. And something did happen. Not much, and certainly not clear what, but there was a sound from behind the walls of something switching on, and a single sudden movement in the pipes around the ceiling, and a change to the lighting in the vicinity of the nearest spheroid. He waited for something more, but there was nothing. Selecting another panel he tried the same procedure, this time paying close attention. A faint but definite sound echoed briefly behind the wall, a small but unmistakable surge in the pipes feeding the closest pod as if from a sudden release of pressure, a slight increase in the local illumination that remained steady, leaving two of the pods now highlighted with respect to the remaining ten. Then nothing. He waited for a while to see if the situation would change, but in the end, as the afternoon wore on, he decided that this mystery was for the moment still unresolved, and left.

-Day 4038

Over the days and weeks that followed the man divided his time between the kenthoni habitat and the telescope, drawn from one to the other and back by insatiable curiosity. Often he would spend whole nights familiarising himself with the newly discovered patterns of the stars, finding and naming constellations and charting their march across the sky over the course of a night. The midnight eclipse afforded an especially convenient opportunity for these observations, lacking the glare of dawn or dusk or the bright face of Lune overhead that overwhelmed all but the brightest of the stars even through the infrared filter. The eclipse also provided a fixed reference by which he could compare the positions of the stars night after night. He observed and measured noteworthy groupings of stars as they disappeared behind the eastern edge of the lunar disk at the moment the eclipse was at its maximum, only to see them re-emerge from the western edge at the same moment two weeks later. With this knowledge he was able to revise his previous estimate for the length of the year to between three hundred and eighty five and three hundred and ninety five days. He hoped eventually to track a whole year, to construct a zodiac fit for this world, and maybe to gain some deeper insight into what his Hosts had done and what they planned to do. One tiny glimpse into the heart of a race that had wrested the resources of an entire galaxy to its own will.

Because of this nocturnal activity he would frequently sleep during the day. Yet he was also interested in observing the kenthoni seed he had planted and would, of a morning or an afternoon, make the trip to the habitat hub to check on its progress. There was certainly progress to check on. The little wasp had begun transforming almost immediately, sprouting fine green fur that covered it like mould, and within days had completely disappeared within a fuzzy ball attached to the ground. With each passing day it grew larger as more and more structure started appearing on it - spiky protrusions, slender leaves, tiny red flowers and lately a complex network of fine hairs that extended outwards in all directions and seemed to be arranging themselves in a dense fractal pattern.

At the very least these activities gave him something to occupy himself, to displace the feelings of loneliness and isolation which once again, with increasing frequency, were intruding on his thoughts.

He had all but forgotten about the Henge when he found himself on that day in its vicinity and decided, almost incidentally, to visit it again and try one more time to understand its purpose. It took a moment, even as he examined the pods, to register the difference that few weeks had made. Something new had appeared and only in the two pods he had activated - a small spherical growth, pinkish in colour and about the size of a grape, resting against the inside surface. He examined each one closely but by the dim light could discern no detail other than a hint of branching veins across their outer skin. The mystery had only deepened, but it did give him something else to contemplate.

-Day 4067

"Sunday, April 17, 11: Afternoon. ... mystery of the Henge now all but solved..."

The note was made within minutes of his first return to the Henge after a four week hiatus from his usual activities, the last three days of which had been spent back on the shore. Since the last inspection he had restarted, and completed, an old project of fabricating a dinghy, piece by piece, and transporting the pieces one at a time to the dock he was simultaneously constructing down the eastern seawall. The project had been a satisfying success. The sections had fitted together into a sturdy and seaworthy craft that could easily be rowed across the moat when the waters were calm. While on the mainland he wandered among the hills and fields and back along the path he'd taken on the way in. He had thought that maybe he might find Nightshade still roaming nearby, but though he did see a herd of wild horses galloping over the distant hills there was no sign of her.

On returning to the City he went immediately to the Henge in the hope that more clues to its purpose might have developed in the meantime. He was not disappointed. The growth within each of the active pods was now about the size of an apple and had become almost fully transparent, revealing an internal structure - a tiny yet intricate organic form of folds and protrusions with a clear left side and right side, mirrored through its midline. Even in the heavily subdued lighting of the Henge, and in spite of its small size, enough detail was visible to make it clear what this was.

It was an embryo. The very first stirrings of a newly created living creature, housed in an artificial womb, the point at which life emerges from chemistry on a scale large enough to be seen with eye alone.

It made perfect sense, of course, in the hard light of reason. The ancestors of every animal on this planet - the wolves and bears and horses, the cattle and sheep, even the egg layers, the fish and birds and reptiles and insects - and the plants and fungi too, for that matter - must have begun as something like this. Genetic codes, and all the background needed to interpret those codes, and the background needed to understand the background, must at some point have been transmitted as pure information, nothing but dots and dashes. Just as he himself had been. Gathered up and used by the Hosts to build and feed incubators like this one somewhere on the planet, maybe even right here. That was how it was done. It could not have been done otherwise. They could not have come as eggs or seeds or even molecules. The distance they had traversed was much too great for that.

There was no question that this was an embryo. The only question was what sort of embryo it was. This early in the process all vertebrate animals look alike. He would find out soon enough as the development proceeded, and from now on he would be watching that with interest.

There was one possibility he did not dare contemplate - or hope for.

-Day 4132

He had been examining the tiny forms for what seemed like hours, first the one then the other, floating serenely in their amniotic bubbles. The recognition had come to him slowly, almost gracefully, over the weeks and days prior to that morning. Some part of him had resisted it for much longer than was reasonable. It was not even clear why - some innate skepticism, a pretence of scientific rigour. More likely it was simple fear - fear of the unknown, fear of the new, fear of being disappointed. He had worked through every possible alternative and dismissed them one by one. It didn't matter now. The little arms ended in hands and tiny fingers, the legs in feet and toes, the distinctive little faces, ill-proportioned but otherwise perfectly formed. Whatever doubts he still wanted to harbour, for whatever reason, were no longer sustainable, and he felt the resignation to it settle onto his soul with palpable relief.

The two beings with whom he now shared the world were unmistakably human.

One boy, one girl. They even moved like humans, kicking and stretching and grasping, testing the limits of their tiny worlds, yawning and pulling faces and sucking their thumbs. Humans. Like him.

No. Not like him. Not copies of ancient individuals, carried from one place to another across great spans of space and time. Not fully formed with all the experience of several lifetimes. The wombs in which they now swam, though artificial, were pure - as close to what nature had created through evolution as was practical under the circumstances. An umbilical chord connected each foetus to the external plumbing through the wall of the pod, carrying nutrients in and waste out. But that was all. Lacking was all the additional paraphernalia needed to accelerate growth and extend gestation, to append the history accumulated over a life to the basic information of the genes, to transfer an established mind into the developing brain. These humans were brand new, fresh and clean and ready to begin their own lives from scratch. They were set to become first babies, then children, then fully functioning people in a universe rich with possibilities, to take their own journey, to grow and learn. And he was the one tasked with teaching them.

Such a terrifying responsibility, he thought. Such an awful burden.

Such a beautiful gift.

-Day 4201

"Monday, September 1, 11: Morning. ... there is no word for what I am to this creature."

As he penned the entry he was sitting on the ground in the core of the Octopus, mask over his face, surrounded by a swarm of tiny insects so dense and numerous that at times he could not see the writing on the page except for their mimicry of it. Strangely, they did not greatly annoy him, even as they crawled by the hundreds through his hair and under his clothes - something about the orderliness of their movement that was almost pleasant, absent the randomness that might have produced a sensation of itching. Only when they got into his eyes did it get too much, and having been blinked away a few times they seemed to know now that was a place to avoid. His biggest fear was causing injury to any of them, so he moved slowly and cautiously when he was near them, though they were remarkably robust for their size - about that of a fruit fly - and moved so fast that he would have had trouble trapping them if he'd wanted to. That also made the details of their individual appearance and behaviour difficult to observe, much as their adult form had always been. In any case he had only to carefully move a few metres back from the parent hive and they would flow from him like quicksilver to the very last one.

He'd been observing their development with equal fascination to that of the foetuses, spending most of his time at one location or the other. Over the previous weeks the sessile had increased in both size and density until it had become a green hemisphere several meters across, solid to all but the closest inspection, and covered over its surface with so intricate a pattern of ridges and valleys that he would, under different circumstances, have been convinced it was carved with the finest hieroglyphs. Then, in just these past days, it had become spotted with small white blemishes, sparsely at first, like acne, but lately spreading and layering the face until it looked like a large cauliflower. Its appearance was such that initially he thought the growing organism had developed a disease, perhaps a tumour or a viral infection that might have killed it. He even went through a phase of grief and guilt at not having known enough to save it. Then, early the previous afternoon, the mass of pimples had revealed itself to be a clutch of eggs only as they began to hatch, by the greatest of good fortune, just as he was there to see it happen. It was mesmerising to watch the process unfold, slowly at first, then rapidly, as if the hatching of each egg spurred its neighbour to do likewise, only slowing down when the whole organism had become alive with seething activity. The entire process had occurred within the span of only ten minutes, making a sound like a sudden heavy rainstorm against a rooftop. The new hatchlings had immediately started orienting and organising themselves into patterns which, while undecipherable, were clearly not random either. Before that Sunday was over they had taken to the wing, expanding and contracting in coordinated rhythmic oscillations away from the central core, increasing their range with each pulse.

He knew immediately and instinctively what this meant - the moment of birth of a new kenthoni. But in the end that was all he knew. He was suddenly very aware of how inadequate he was to the task he had been given. He had no idea what to feed it, what to teach it, how to raise it. Neither parent nor guardian nor mentor. He had little enough idea how to raise a member of his own species, but in that case there was at least a tangible relationship - a common biological heritage, a shared culture and history he would be able to call upon. Here he was totally out of his depth. All he could do was hope that the designers of this nursery understood these shortcomings and had made provision for them. The only thing he would be able to do for this infant alien was give it a name.

And for the moment he could not even do that.

-Day 4271

Having no idea what to expect or when to expect it, he had spent three days and three mostly sleepless nights pacing back and forth and round and round the Henge, sitting or lying on the floor, waiting and watching and listening for something - anything - to happen. In the end his nerves were on a knife's edge - perhaps, he thought, not the best state of mind to be in for what was to come, but what else could he do?

The weeks prior to that had been spent almost beside himself in a rush of preparation, as if it had only just occurred to him that any preparation would be needed. He had designed and fabricated numerous prototypes for feeding bottles and experimented with a variety of recipes using cream and water - based on sheer guesswork alone - for something with the consistency of mother's milk. He had generated reams of cloth to use as swaddling and nappies, manufactured bassinets and perambulators, and found among the residential regions of the City suitable quarters to use as a nursery. He regretted having simultaneously activated two of those artificial wombs, and was equally grateful that he had not activated more of them.

In quieter moments he'd been giving thought to what he would name them. He'd variously contemplated names of people he had known from his own past, people close to him, friends and wives, or what popular christian names he could recall from his own long dead culture, or other equally distant cultures he had known in a bid to revitalise their memories. Or to invent new names, new sounds that would mark them as unique, new individuals in a new world disconnected with the past. They were, after all, part of a much bigger universe than he or his entire race had previously known about. But in the end he settled on names that were appropriate to some small piece of the heritage they would one day call their own. The boy would be Adam, the girl Eve.

For all the preparation and all the waiting, the first arrival was sudden and unexpected, and mercifully quick. It was announced simply when the pod holding the girl child spontaneously ruptured from the bottom, spilling its liquid contents over the floor through a small opening. It was all he could do to jump up and reach it in readiness for the next part of the process. With the pressure inside released the pod's membrane contracted like an elastic balloon, constricting the tiny infant within and squeezing it from the top. Waves of compression rippled across the membrane forcing first the baby's head, then the shoulders through the opening which had widened just enough to accommodate them. Finally the entire little body was free, slippery with residual fluid but securely cradled in his hands. There was a tense moment in which she seemed to be struggling to take her first breath, but without any prompting from him she let out a mournful wail that was to him the most glorious sound he had heard in over a decade. He pulled IceNeedle from his belt - fully, terrifyingly mindful of the incongruous juxtaposition between so sharp an instrument and so delicate and precious a creature - and cut the umbilical cord that still connected her through the collapsed womb to the mechanisms that had nourished and sustained her for nine months. With that action done a new, separate life entered his world and, for the first time since his own arrival, he did not feel alone.

"Welcome to the universe, Eve," he whispered.

It seemed as if the world around them faded into insignificance as he gazed into her face, time slowing to a crawl and all of space condensing to a tiny bubble. Overcome with emotion he found himself sobbing. He would have to be everything to this child, not just father and mother, not just teacher and guide. The history and culture and values, the heritage of her entire race all the way back to its origin on a distant planet in a distant galaxy, would come to her through him. He who had outlived civilisations, who had traversed the space between the galaxies themselves, who had made contact with the only other mind in the universe, had been given the greatest honour, and the greatest challenge, of his life. But that was a task for the future. For now he was content to simply hold her.

Until ... somewhere across the room, the second water broke.

"To everything there is a season, and for every purpose a time." (Ecc 3:1)

Epilogue

-Day 18671

The old man sat on the crest of a small dune overlooking the sandy desert as the sun dipped behind a bank of cloud lining the western horizon. Not far off two children were climbing a makeshift ladder into the black mushroom shaped tower, disappearing for a moment inside it, then sliding down its smooth, tapered stem to the sand below. They squealed and laughed with youthful enthusiasm as they repeated the process over and over. It made him smile to hear it. He took a journal and Quill from his pack, the first opportunity he'd had all day to satisfy a lifelong habit.

"Tuesday, November 11, 51: Afternoon. Arrived this morning. It feels so strange to be back after all these years. So strange..."

He looked at the date again. Its significance had already been pointed out, but seeing it written down now, along with everything else that was going on, obligated a short note.

"... and happy birthday Eve. Happy birthday Adam. Has it really been that long?"

As he returned the journal to its place he noticed the almost complete wooden statuette he'd been carving. He took IceNeedle from his belt and began idly scraping at the final details. Perhaps it would be finished before nightfall. He paused for a moment and looked at the blade in his hand. More memories came flooding back. It was the same knife he had been given all those years ago, not so far from where he was now - never replaced, never even sharpened, yet as keen and clean as it had been when they were both young.

"Joshua. Loretta. Time to come in now."

He turned towards the voice. A young woman was approaching from the direction of the river. She walked up, smiling, and sat down beside him.

"How are you feeling?" she asked.

He wasn't sure how to answer her question, at least not briefly. He wasn't sure how he was feeling himself.

"I'll be OK," he said simply. "How do you feel, Portia? You must miss your parents, especially today, on their birthday."

"I'm good," she said. "It won't be much longer before they come, and the Way gets easier with each crossing. Or so I'm told."

"Well it's certainly easier coming back than going out, I can tell you," he said, "and at my age that's saying something." They both laughed.

"Joshua!" she called out again to the children who had ignored her first instruction. "Come down from there!"

"Mama, did you see? Did you see, Papa Joe?" The boy ran up the hill to them and collapsed at their feet. The girl was not far behind.

"Yes, we saw," said Portia, scowling gently at him.

"Mother says that is where you were born," said the girl, looking at the old man. "Is that true Papa Joe? Is that where you were born?" She was older than the boy, about eight - or was it nine? He was starting to loose track.

"Well ...", he began, "... sort of. Actually, I was really born a very long way ..."

Portia held up a finger to her lips. "Not too long a tail now, Papa Joe."

He sighed. It had been a source of much controversy, even within his own mind, how much information to give to the children and how quickly. It was always his intention to tell them everything, eventually. The older children had heard more of his story and that of their race, and the adults more still, but no one knew all of it - not yet. And he hated risking any amount of misinformation if there was a more accurate way of expressing something. "OK ... Let's just say, that is where I first came here. And yes, it was a bit like being born."

He handed the little wooden carving to the lad. "Here Joshy," he said, "I made this for you. Do you know what it is?"

"Is that a ... a barkfish?" Loretta responded on the boy's behalf. "You fell into a whole pit full of them once and were almost swallowed up."

"That's right."

She wrinkled her nose in disgust, "yewe!"

"Yewe," Joshua repeated, and giggled.

"Uncle Bart and Uncle Hel are there right now," Loretta continued, looking more serious. "I hope they don't fall into it."

"Oh, I'm sure they won't make the same mistakes I did," he smiled at her reassuringly. "Besides, Joshy's Grandma and Grandpa were there just a few years ago," he added, rubbing the boy's hair, "and they came back just fine, didn't they Mate?"

"Alright," Portia held up a hand to end the conversation. "There'll be plenty of time for stories later. Right now it's time to get back. Loretta, your mother needs help with supper, and you, young man, tell your father you'll need a bath to wash that sand off. Go on now."

The old man watched them run off, hand in hand, towards the river and the little homestead, Joshua waving his new toy through the air like a bird in flight. They were the third generation, his great grandchildren. At least that is how he thought of them. He knew it wasn't right - he wasn't really related to any of the colonists, not in a way that would have made sense to a traditional genealogist at any rate. Yet he had always thought he could pick something like a family resemblance, even back to the first generation - the Twelve. Some had his nose, some his eyes. Nor was it his imagination only. At each birth, or at a naming ceremony, others would make a sport of going around pointing out resemblances, and he was always included. A genetic commonality deeper than their shared humanity. Actually it made perfect sense. He was the template, the genetic model of his kind. Sending him here along with a whole ecosystem and the instructions to rebuild it must have been expensive, even for those commanding the power of the stars themselves. To use a single genetic code as the template and make simple variations on it was ... economical. He had become the archetype of a new race. At some point a conscious decision had been taken to trust that inbreeding would not be a problem - surely the Hosts would have seen to that - though he had also encouraged some conventional decorum in the selection of pair bonds for his children and grandchildren.

"Is there any news of Bart and Helmer?" Portia interrupted his train of thought once the children had shrunk away in the distance.

"Probably nothing you don't already know," he said. "Mister Green and Mrs Wise are monitoring progress. Latest report is that things are going well. By the way, it won't be long before Green Junior is up and running too. He, or she, looked almost ready to fledge the other day when I was coming through Jimitry Lodge. Oh, and there are some hints of another hab north of the Lake. That will bring the total to six, and probably a lot more to find. One day we'll have a solid network."

"That doesn't do Bart and Helmer much good." She seemed decidedly unimpressed by the gossip.

"No, I guess it doesn't," he sighed. "Look, I'm sure they'll do great, just like your parents did. You know what they're like - Bartholemew is ever the diplomat, and Helmer is an excellent translator. Far better than I ever was. Almost as good as your mother."

"I know," she said. "I just wish we understood them better than we do, what they want, what they know about the Hosts. We don't even know how they talk to each other across the Gap, or even between habs."

He laughed. "They're probably asking exactly the same questions about us."

She was young, barely into her twenties, but wise beyond her years and already burdened by the uncertainties and insecurities that always accompany wisdom. Raised in knowledge her entire race for its entire history had only dreamt of holding, and still not enough. He could not help but smile at the gentle irony of it.

"I guess," he went on, "for now our job is to find out - to answer all these questions and learn as much about them as we can. After that, who knows. That's how it works. We discover who we are and where we're going and what we're meant to be doing, and we do it one step at a time. That's what life is. That's what life has always been. I should know, I've lived enough of it."

There was a long silence. The sky brightened slightly as the sun reappeared through a gap in the clouds just above the line of low hills.

"You know you shouldn't let the children ..." Her voice trailed off, but she indicated towards Eden Tower sitting isolated in the sand before them. He knew where she was going with this.

"Oh, they can't do any harm," he said.

"That isn't the point," she scolded him. "There are places and things that are ... special to us. Things that should be respected. Many of us feel that way."

He knew she was right. He had seen the signs of it himself, over the years as the little community grew and the stories he himself had told to one generation were passed on to the next. Artefacts - IceNeedle and Thunderbuss and LocoMotor, functional and useful as they still were, and also employed as props in the telling of stories - were increasingly seen as sacred items, objects of legend. And his journals, once little more than aids to his own recall and sounding boards for his private thoughts, were becoming viewed as holy writ. Perhaps that was an inevitable part of growing up. Certainly he had heard of similar things before on countless worlds that human souls had come to occupy, even seen it on those of which he had been a part. But it was not a trend he was comfortable with.

"These special places," he said, "these hallowed objects, are they of greater importance than the people who give them meaning? They are just dead matter, and the universe is full of dead things. Dead things are not the things that have real value. Believe me, I know. I've seen the places minds greater than yours or mine would call holy, temples that would make the City look small, worlds stripped to the core and reassembled into houses of prayer, whole suns locked in cages so they can light the way for people seeking the divine. Don't you know I would trade all of that for what I have right here. I know that's what I'd do, because that's exactly what I did. And besides," he added looking at her with mock solemnity betrayed by the slightest smile, "what is the universe for, if not for children to play in?"

She returned the solemn gaze and the smile, along with a look of the deepest reverence.

"I'm tempted to ask how you know what the universe is for," she said, "but I'm frightened you might actually have an answer."

She stood up. "Are you coming?"

"You go ahead, I'll be down soon."

"Don't be too long," she started walking towards the river. "You know how dark it gets here at night."

"Yes," he said, "I remember."

He did remember. Not only how dark but how quickly the darkness fell. The last sliver of sun disappeared behind the low western hills and within minutes he was surrounded by blackness. No twilight. No dusk. No gradual fading of the light. No stars to texture the sky. The last time he was here all of that had been a mystery, now he was back with those mysteries solved. He knew what lay behind the horizon, and above it. He knew where he was and what he was doing there - sort of. He was a very small player in a very big game. That's what he was, an infinitesimal piece of an infinite puzzle. A question answered, a hundred still to go. And beyond that - untold thousands he did not even know how to ask.

He rose to his feet. Old, he thought. He had been old for a long time, but now he felt it - for the first time in his very long life he actually felt old. What was more, for the first time he had no plan for what came next, for what would happen after this phase of his life finally came to a close. In the past he had been close enough to whatever authorities held sovereignty over the part of the cosmos he occupied at the time to be able to have such a plan. But the Hosts were aloof and ever mysterious, like the imagined gods of old, existing only as a name and an interpretation of what he could see around him. They had, it was true, intervened once before to give him another chance at life when all other hope had been lost. Maybe they would again. Maybe he would get to see how the universe unfolded, step by step, into the far distant future they had started to set up.

Or maybe not.

It didn't matter. He had seen more and done more and lived more than any one of his race had any right to expect, certainly more than the boy growing up on a farm on Earth, so very far away and so very long ago, could have imagined possible. Whatever happened next, humanity now had a place in it, and he could be satisfied in the part he had played in making that so. Whatever the future held for him, that at least was a noble thing to have done.

He turned to the single source of light penetrating the lonely night - the one point of certainty in a universe filled with wonderful mystery, the only answer to the only question that mattered - and started walking. The little cottage by the river, its warm fires lighting his way home.
