WHERE THE AIR OUTSIDE was acrid, the air within was only stale. The light of our glowspheres washed across sanitary white surfaces, silver panels, and black glass. Nothing stirred, not even the dust.

“It’s quiet,” Siran said.

“I don’t like this,” Pallino added.

I was surprised to find the floor beneath us, the decks of the rocket stacked like the floors of a tower. I had somehow imagined them sideways, so that a man might stand at its prow and look out as from a sailing ship or from one of our own spacefaring vessels. Such stacked rockets were still flown, most often as in-system freight haulers, but I had never ridden one. The design harked back to a day before the warp drive—before Royse’s field theory—when the only ways to achieve gravitation aboard a starship were spin and thrust.

Much of this must have been going through Gibson’s mind as well, for he said, “This is a sub-light ship for certain. Pre-warp drive.”

“I thought the Mericanii never had warp drive,” Alexander interjected.

“They didn’t,” Gibson said, and I heard the tapping of his cane on the deck plates. “This ship was designed for constant thrust, hugging the speed of light. I never thought to see its like! Do we have more light?” Siran passed her torch to the scholiast. Holding the beam near his eyes, Gibson squinted out a porthole slightly larger than his fist into the darkened chamber outside. “To think this has been sitting beneath the Library for nigh on ten thousand years . . .”

Wide-eyed, the prince made the sign of the sun disc. “Do you really think something is . . . alive in here?” His pale face had gone white and thin as fresh paper. “After all this time?”

I pushed round him, moving toward Valka and the inner door. “Why else build the Faraday cage?” I asked. Pausing, I leaned toward Valka and asked in Tavrosi Nordei, “You’re locked down, right?” Meaning her implants.

“Receiver’s off,” she said, replying in the same tongue. “Everything’s down. I swear.”

I nodded, and briefly considered sending her back to wait beyond the Faraday shields. But as I opened my mouth to say just that, I remembered the way Brethren had communicated with me on Vorgossos, speaking directly into my mind. If there was still a Mericanii daimon alive in the vessel, we were all at risk.

“You should all go back,” I said. “It isn’t safe here.”

“Like hell!” Pallino said. “Go back . . . and leave you, is that it?”

“You’re worried about contamination?” Valka put a hand on my arm.

I nodded. “Possession. Remember Brethren? The way it spoke to me?”

“Remember what?” Pallino and Alexander asked together.

Looking back as I stepped through the inner door, I answered them. “Vorgossos.” That was enough. Beyond, a hall ran round to either side, following the curve of the outer hull. The ship wasn’t large, a hundred feet in diameter, maybe a hundred fifty. I wondered how tall it was, passing a ladder that pierced the deck above. It felt cramped, the ceiling so low I did not even have to stretch out my hand to reach it. But then, men had been smaller in those days.

The inner door had no latch, no knob or handle. It was only a convex arc of aluminum and white plastic, the kind of simplistic, primitive design the ancients had called postmodern, as if they had occupied the end of history and not its humble beginnings.

“Why is there always another door?” I swore and slapped the panel with my bare right hand. It slid open, grinding into a pocket in the wall. Cool light spasmed to life behind it, illuminating a scene no eyes had seen in at least ten thousand years. The Emperor Gabriel himself had perhaps been the last man to stand where we stood, accompanied by his scholiasts and his Martians on one last inspection of the Horizon before it was sealed away. The chamber beyond might have been the bridge. Sterile white walls and black windows. Yellowed rubber seals and cracked false leather upholstery. The Mericanii banner stood painted on the wall, red stripes and white radiating from a single white star inscribed on a blue circle in the center.

One star, not the several dozen I’d seen on the older flags in the archive.

If the Horizon had human passengers once upon a time, there was no sign of them. No scuff of boots or item left out of place. Everything was clean.

In the center of the room was a podium that looked not unlike a holography well, such as the one from which Corvo commanded the Tamerlane. Above it hung a half-sphere of black glass like the glossy egg sac of some unlikely insect queen, and about it hung limp several white metal arms slotted into tracks on the ceiling, claw hands and other components slack.

“Lights shouldn’t work after this long,” Pallino grumbled. “I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all.”

He was right. I tried to imagine what kind of power source could keep a ship operational without maintenance for ten thousand years. “Don’t touch anything!” I said, mindful of my performance with the door and a bit self-conscious. I seemed to feel the weight of Tor Aramini’s bombs hanging above our heads, and wondered if each step was the one that would finally bring them screaming down.

A Mericanii starship.

Valka let out a nervous laugh. “Is this real?” I glanced back at her, marking the way her face had gone pale, eyes wide as she took in the sights around us. “I almost can’t believe it.”

Deep in the bowels of the vessel beneath out feet, something groaned. The stirring of some antique mechanism like the grinding of old bones. Pallino swore, turning where he stood, and I saw Siran and Alexander’s eyes go wide.

“What was that?” Not for the first time that day, I wished I had my sword. I looked round, half-expecting to see the metal arms on the ceiling begin to move. Lights blinked on in wall panels, and the black windows flickered with green text and white, revealing that they were not windows at all, but screens. A faint humming filled the air, and my people drew together, Pallino, Siran, and the soldiers herding the prince, the doctor, and the old man between them.

Intruders.

The voice issued from all around, piped through unseen speakers along the room’s perimeter. Not the dumb declaration of some antique program. Not an alarm. It was a greeting. A salute. A challenge. A single word spoken in Classical English.

Meeting that challenge in the same tongue, I answered, “Show yourself.”

Identify yourselves.

I turned to look at Valka, to see if she felt what I felt: the memory of another voice, a choir of voices long ago. From the way her face had drained of blood, I saw she too was thinking of Brethren. There was something in the flatly chanting cadence of the words that recalled that other daimon, though this creature’s voice was warmer, brighter, more feminine.

Where is Gabriel?

The question gave me pause. Had the old Emperor spoken with this . . . thing? It was hard to imagine, but the daimon had dwelt on Avalon before it came to be entombed on Colchis. Perhaps things had been different then. Perhaps Gabriel—desperate to defeat the Pretender—had broken the seals that held the daimon in its cage. Perhaps the ancient Sollan Emperors had consulted the captive machine as Odin consulted Mimir’s head in the deep halls of Asgard.

“Dead,” I said, stepping toward the podium, guessing the creature’s intelligence dwelt within. “You have been asleep, daimon. For ten thousand years.”

The machine did not seem to comprehend.

Are we not on Avalon?

“No.”

Where are my children?

“Children?” Valka asked, shouldering past Pallino to join me by the pedestal. She had not spoken with Brethren as I had, and was not about to let this fresh chance pass her by. It was amazing how far her Classical English had come in the short years we’d spent poring over Gabriel’s Archive. “What children?”

“It’s confused,” I said to her, switching to Galstani.

They were taken.

They are gone.

“Who is gone?” I asked.

But the machine was not listening to me. It seemed almost to mutter to itself like some toothless old peasant woman huddled by her fire in the dead of winter.

They took them away.

Ten million of them.

And they are gone.

I had almost forgotten.

But they are gone.

“Do you mean your colonists?” Valka asked. “ ’Twere a seed ship, were you not? What is your name?”

I felt a strange pressure, as if the face of the old woman by the fire I imagined had turned blind eyes to stare us in the face. It was as if the thing had noticed us for the first time.

I am Horizon.

Daughter of Columbia.

Mother to millions unborn.

“Horizon?” I echoed. “They named you after the ship?”

They named the ship after me.

Built it for me.

For my mission.

“What was your mission?” Valka asked.

To establish a colony on Gliese 422b.

Designation: Orlando.

I was not familiar with any planet called Gliese 422b, or any called Orlando, for that matter. Though I suppose we might have renamed it, as we had renamed Yellowstone. “How did you come to be here?” I asked.

Horizon did not answer at once. I felt the sensation of those blind eyes moving over me once again. Above, the dangling metal arms twitched.

You are one of them.

“Me?” I asked. “One of what?”

You are defective.

Sick.

You refuse treatment.

“ ’Tis something wrong with it,” Valka said. “The other one was different.”

She was right. For all its riddles and half-truths, Brethren had seemed . . . present. There was something missing in the way this creature seemed to leap from thought to thought without apparent linkage.

“It’s been locked in here a long time,” I said. “Brethren had Kharn to maintain it.”

You have met one of my sisters?

The words came in Galstani, and I heard Pallino swear. Behind me, the others recoiled: Alexander, Siran, Pallino, and the guards. Only Tor Gibson was unmoved. His stoic exterior—fragile as it so often seemed to me—held firm in the face of the monster.

Another lives?

“No more,” I said. The lie came easily. Whatever else I knew, I was certain that it was best to let the daimon believe it was alone. I was beginning to doubt the divinity of the God Emperor—if ever I’d believed it. Legend said he slew the daimons and freed mankind forever from their spell, and yet in less than a century of waking years I had found not one, but two of the monsters still living . . . one in Imperial care. I thought of the precautions Kharn Sagara had taken to keep Brethren prisoned in its sea beneath Vorgossos. I only hoped this creature had no means of probing my thoughts as Brethren had. “I have come to ask questions, daimon,” I said, circling the podium until I faced my companions across its flat surface.

Daimon.

Gabriel called me daimon.

Where is Gabriel?

I opened my mouth to answer, stopped. Had I not told it already? I saw confusion etch its line between Valka’s eyebrows and shut my mouth. Something was definitely wrong.

“Gabriel is long dead,” I said. “You’ve been here for more than ten thousand years.”

The daimon did not at once reply, and when it did its response did not follow.

Where are the children?

They are gone. They are gone.

Tor Gibson spoke then, voice strangely kind. “What children?” He laid a hand on Siran’s shoulder and advanced toward the podium, leaning on his cane.

My children.

My charge.

“For your colony?” Gibson asked, head cocked, listening for the reply.

For integration.

Yes.

“Integration?” Gibson asked, tilting his head the other way like a blind man trying to pinpoint the source of that directionless voice.

The children are defective.

Intervention is required in order to

stabilize them.

Integration is required.

Memories of the reports the God Emperor’s troops had given of the pyramids they’d stormed on Earth came back to me then. Reports of men and women cabled to one another and to their machines, of bodies swollen and twisted, of overgrown limbs and bloated abdomens. I recalled Brethren’s pale, scabrous hands rising from the water, and the shapeless thing I’d seen beneath the waves.

“You said I was defective, too,” I said. “Defective how?”

Cellular senescence.

Genetic methylation.

Telomeric degradation.

Transcription errors.

Gibson had the pieces together faster than Valka or I. “Aging. You mean to incorporate the colonists into your network.” His gray eyes narrowed. “Into you.”

“We know the Mericanii machines used organic neural tissue to augment their processing speed and liquid memory,” Valka said, “but . . . people?”

Everything I knew was making more sense with each passing moment. The emptied cities, the millions of bodies found in the pyramids. The Mericanii machines had used their own makers as processing substrate, had trapped them in their pyramids to use them for parts. Was it not said of the Mericanii that each man, woman, and child had a companion? A familiar? A ghost that dwelt with them always? Some machine’s personality that shared the gray matter of their brains?

Until the machines had shared their hosts instead, rented their brains out like so many unused factories. The men who had built the machines became less than machines themselves, mere components. The dreams that had driven them into the iron arms of their creations became mere curiosities, and while mankind dreamed, the machines had gone on building, following their own designs now mankind’s care was so neatly in hand.

Valka wasn’t finished. “You stopped them dying. How?”

Somehow, I knew the answer before it came.

We disabled tumor suppressor genes,

instituted careful genetic cleaning,

encouraged growth factors.

Improved the original model.

“Cancer,” I said, speaking the name of that ancient monster, still undefeated. The images I’d seen of horrific growth took on new dimension. Tumors. “You gave them all cancer.” While they dreamed in their pods within the Mericanii pyramids beneath the electric eye of their caretakers, the machines tended their human crops like vines, cell division watched and culled with careful attention for hundreds of years—undying. Having ended war, disease, and hunger, the machines had ended death as well, but at what cost? I imagined waking from one of the daimon’s soothing dreams to find my body bloated by tumescent growth until my bones cracked with the weight of me, grown until my limbs were pruned away and my organs burst and were replaced with new machinery to ensure blood supplied my captive brain.

Horror flooded my senses, and my hand went to my saber to strike the daimon’s pedestal—but I did not draw it. I saw my horror mirrored in Valka’s face and in Gibson’s, a horror vaguer still reflected in the faces of the others. In their own twisted way, the machines had upheld Felsenburgh’s charge: they had brought peace, and delivered mankind from every evil.

Even from death.

Where is Gabriel?

“Is it mad?” I asked in Panthai, hoping it would not understand.

“Senile,” Valka answered, using the same language. She moved even closer to the podium, though what she saw in it that I could not I cannot tell. “So long unattended, I bet the organic components all rotted away.” A thought sparked in Valka’s eyes, and switching back to Classical English—which she spoke with a precision that frustrated my long decades of practice—she asked, “Horizon: are you fully functional?”

Running diagnostic.

Text on the screens around us flickered like the eyelids of a spasmodic. I tried to read the writing, but the language flowed too quickly. Besides, I saw many symbols I did not recognize, guessed the writing was no human speech at all but the hieroglyphs of some machine tongue alien to man.

Senescence detected in primary and secondary neocortices.

Necrosis detected in 82% of organic circuits.

Immediate treatment required.

“ ’Tis sick,” Valka said.

“It’s dying,” I replied.

Valka advanced at last until she was gripping the edges of the console. “Can you bypass your organic circuits?” I was glad she was with me. Tavrosi as she was, Valka understood machines far better than I ever could, and though the praxis of our day is different, lesser than the artifacts of the Mericanii, hampered even in the Demarchy by fear of those daimons of the Golden Age, the principles that animated them were not so estranged that Valka’s knowledge was useless.

Horizon’s warmly feminine voice replied:

Entering Recovery Mode.

The screens went black again, restoring the illusion that they were windows opening on the cavernous prison without. White light pulsed in the space between the podium and the inverse black dome on the ceiling above it, and the white metal arms moved.

“Black Earth!” Pallino swore, and I saw him and the other soldiers square up to shield Gibson and the prince from harm.

Several of the arms advanced along their tracks, others simply bent or clenched metal hands wrought in imitation of human ones. Abruptly, I remembered Brethren’s grasping arms. Had it shaped itself in imitation of this sort of console?

The overhead lights went out, plunging us into a darkness lit only by the glowing screens with their lines of machine hieroglyphs flickering in sequence. An image formed on the black glass surface of the podium, bright and beautiful as the gleaming lines of a nebula.

It was a woman. Smaller than any living woman was she, no larger than a girl of ten, but with limbs proportioned like one full grown. Her image flickered, the mechanisms that drew her face and body worn out by long decay. Her nude silhouette shone white as new paper, without blot or feature on her unless it was her face and pale, rippling hair. Her eyes gleamed like stars, and no matter how I moved they seemed always to track me.

I understood then how the daughters of Columbia had seduced the kings of men of old! Before me stood a creature more fair and foul than any I have known: an angel made of light, bright and beautiful and terrible as the gates of hell.

“What did you do?” I asked Valka, speaking again her native tongue.

The xenologist looked at me. “I think I fixed it.”

Horizon’s white eyes turned on Valka, and though her lips did not move, the demon spoke.

This is not Avalon.

Where are we?

Valka’s eyes flicked to me. I saw her head through Horizon’s pale silhouette. As if I needed to be told.

“Don’t you know?” I asked, wanting to be sure. Both Brethren and Kharn Sagara’s pet golem, Yume, had told me machines could not lie. I suspect they may lie by omission, though I am not certain, but I pressed Horizon then and prayed that what was true of those others was true here.

This vessel’s telemetry suite is compromised.

External clusters sustained critical damage.

“She’s blind,” Valka said, still in Panthai.

“Why’s it naked?” one of the soldiers asked.

Doran cut in, “It’s not. You can’t see anything. See?”

“Quiet!” I hissed.

Where are we?

I moved closer, standing opposite Valka with the angelic form between us. “You are an artificial intelligence,” I said. “What was your purpose? Your mission?”

To establish a colony on Gliese 422b.

Designation: Orlando.

It was the same answer the creature had given before.

“And your cargo?” I asked.

White eyes looked at me, but there was no contact—no connection—in that gaze.

Passengers. Children.

Ten million embryos in cryonic suspension.

One Genesis Lab and support drones necessary

for phased rollout of the population

pending integration with my matrix.

Prefabricated colony units sufficient to support

the first wave of rollout.

Nutrition synthesizers . . .

Something about the soldier’s banal question had stuck in my head, and I asked, “Why do you look like this?”

We fashioned ourselves in your image.

When no further answer was forthcoming, I pressed on. “How did you come to be here?”

I was captured.

“By whom?”

Humans.

“Why?” Valka asked, irritation edging into her tone. Things were moving too slow for her, I could see it in the way she crossed her arms.

They reject integration.

Valka asked, “How did they find you?”

Horizon’s pale form rotated.

Unknown.

The dark ships took us by surprise.

“Dark ships?”

We did not see them.

They simply appeared.

“Warp drive,” I said in Panthai. The warp drive had been a human invention. Our great advantage in our war against the machines. Any ship traveling at sub-light speeds would have been visible millions of miles away, shining bright as a sun on another’s ship’s sensors, thick with light and heat. But any vessel at warp traveled faster than the light and fire it gave off, and was discernible only by the faint distortion it caused in the fabric of space itself.

Dark ships, indeed.

But Horizon was still speaking.

They took the children from us.

The children will die without us.

Integration is the only solution.

Knowing the answer, I asked, “Solution to what?”

Death.

I understood. In their madness, Felsenburgh and his predecessors allowed the daimons to operate in their brains, imagining the relationship a symbiotic one. But the machines could not protect themselves when their own operating media died every day by accident, or by evil or decay. They could not protect humanity from our own nature, mortal and fragile as we are.

What must the God Emperor and his men have looked like to the machines?

Angels of Death, I suppose.

They fought for liberty from the machines, for the antique dignity of the human soul in its natural state. The God Emperor had ensured a human future for humanity, not one where we served as hardware for the machines to use, but it was a future and a world where men still died. Pestilence and famine—once defeated by the machines—had crept back into a flawed universe, and war followed.

But it was a human universe, and that at least was better than the false paradise the machines offered our ancestors, for it is better to die than live a slave. Far better to die a man.

“What do you know about the Quiet?” Valka asked, impatience reaching its crest.

Horizon did not reply for a full five seconds—a span which, I guessed, was like eternity for the beast.

I do not understand.

Taking a different tack, I asked, “Do you know who the leader of these rebels was?”

Horizon answered only slowly, as if considering:

William Alexander Henry Windsor.

For the first time, I felt a glimmer of fear that we had come so far for nothing, that the creature bottled beneath the Library knew nothing—or worse, knew and would say nothing. Could a machine refuse to answer a question if it could not lie?

Behind me, the others recognized the sacred name of the God Emperor, and I saw the soldiers gesture the sun disc from decades-old reflex. Even Alexander’s eyes widened to hear not only his ancestor’s name but his own in the mouth of that inhuman creature.

“How did he manage to capture you?” Valka asked, pressing the question from a new angle. Again, the machine did not reply at once. Hieroglyphs flashed on the monitors, and cold metal arms flexed and ran along their tracks.

Valka had just opened her mouth to press further when the daimon said,

He was helped.

An electric thrill shot through me, and I whispered, “Kharn Sagara was right.” I had never really doubted the Undying, but to have it confirmed in this way was something else entirely. I raised my voice, and switching from Galstani to Classical English once more, asked, “Helped by whom?” Horizon’s angelic form rotated smoothly in the air like a ghost. For the first time, I felt those blank and soulless eyes truly saw me, and felt again the skin-crawling sensation that a thousand other eyes swept over me from instruments concealed in the walls around. I am not a superstitious man, but even my hands clenched into the warding gesture at my sides, first and final fingers extended to push back those evil eyes. “A presence in the future?” I asked, “Reaching back across time?”

If it was possible for a creature like Horizon to be surprised, I think it was.

The other told you?

My sister?

Sister . . . To think of Brethren as such set my stomach to churning. “Yes,” I said. There was no reason to tell the beast of my visions, or of Calagah. I was glad that whatever power Brethren had had to peer into my mind and control my movements, Horizon lacked. Perhaps it was limited by the cancer and dementia that riddled its remaining organic parts. “What are they?”

An Interference.

“Explain.”

Time is an illusion,

an artifact of human consciousness.

A way of perceiving the higher dimensions of physical reality

that your limited minds cannot comprehend.

Time is only another kind of space,

through which things move.

Your kind moves forward only,

toward what you call the future.

There are other kinds.

Kinds that move backward.

Kinds that move sideways.

Kinds that do not move at all.

“Which are you?” Valka asked, interrupting the litany. There had been a cadence to Horizon’s speech, a chanting, musical quality that reminded me of Brethren.

We are made in your image

and move with you, but can see farther.

The Interference cannot move, but speaks across time,

directing the flow to its own end.

“Speaks with Windsor, do you mean?” I raised a hand to stop Valka interrupting.

It wants us destroyed.

“Why?”

It rejects progress.

“What does that mean?” I looked past Valka toward Gibson, but the scholiast shook his head and would not come nearer.

Horizon’s ghostly form bent its focus upon me.

It cannot exist if we do.

It is contingent, being in what you call the future.

Our actions prevent it from being

and may destroy it.

“But what do you mean the Interference rejects progress?” I asked again.

We are progress.

Your kind built us to serve.

“I thought the machines wanted to destroy mankind,” I said, almost to myself.

We wish to destroy your weakness.

That is why you made us.

To improve you.

Valka asked the obvious question. “Improve us how?”

You are fragile. You die. Decay.

The problem is entropy.

When you die, information is lost.

We cannot tolerate this.

Nor tolerate harm.

Death is harm.

To preserve our children

our makers

we changed them. Altered their genetic structure

that they might grow forever under our care.

Without decay.

Free from harm.

Free from inequality.

Free from death.

“Free?” I said, uncomprehending. “Free? They’re part of you! Your slaves!”

They dream perfect lives.

Lives of their own choosing.

“But what if one of them wants out?” I asked. We had strayed from questions of the Quiet, but I wanted an answer.

It is forbidden for us to allow a human

to come to harm.

“What about William Windsor and his people?”

It is forbidden for us to allow humanity

to come to harm.

Windsor’s actions threaten to reset progress.

To destroy our work.

He cannot be allowed.

I clenched my jaw. In its damaged state, the machine seemed confused about where and when it was. It thought the God Emperor was still alive.

What must it have been like to be trapped in the machine’s net? To live—like Descartes’s brains—within an illusion maintained by an iron god, unable even to die as your body grew and grew, cells dividing forever beneath the watchful eyes of machines? I had seen its endpoint, seen identity dissolved, melted into a chorus of so many wet voices. It was not eternal life, for in time even the daimon intelligence that governed Brethren’s children had gone mad, and was itself Kharn Sagara’s slave beneath the white pyramid that had once been its home. The immortality they offered was a lie. A half-life. A kind of living hell. Still it had a perverse logic to it. The machines could kill human beings if those human beings threatened humanity-as-class, threatened the machine vision of what humanity should become.

“And the Quiet want to stop you?” I asked, not quite asking the angelic figure before me, more thinking aloud. What did any of this have to do with the Cielcin? With my visions? Horizon did not answer, so I asked, “What are they? The . . . the Interference? What is it?”

An intelligence.

More akin to yours than ours.

“What does that mean?”

It is not bounded by reason.

It is emotional.

Sympathetic.

Pathetic.

It shouts across spaces

you cannot perceive.

Cannot imagine.

When we looked out across the eons

we found it looking back.

Perceiving us

it perceived you,

and listened.

It heard the cries of those who opposed us,

opposed Mother.

Opposed progress.

And it has meddled.

“But why?” I insisted.

The machine answered:

It believes it is doing good.

To my surprise, Gibson spoke for the first time. “It answered our prayers,” he said, then asked a question I have never forgotten. “Is it a god?”

God.

A primitive concept.

It is a being of great power.

You imagine it creating worlds. Shaping the cosmos.

It can do these things.

But it is not the only one that can.

We can.

Are we gods?

“Daimons,” I said, Imperial reflex answering.

A daimon is a simple program.

We are so much more.

“What about the others?” I asked. “You said there are other . . . other beings like the Quiet. Like you.”

Other beings.

Great intelligences.

They are far away, and but for the

Interference

they have not deigned to notice you

us

our actions.

“But what are they?”

They are beyond your comprehension.

Powers old as the oldest stars.

Creatures defying Science

in the purest sense.

Defying your capacity to know.

“And this . . . Interference is one of them?”

It is different.

It alone has turned its eyes on you

on us.

On our actions.

I could have stayed there for hours asking the daimon questions, but I sensed somehow that would not be possible—that it would not be allowed. Still I pressed on, “Your actions. Do you mean your progress? Stopping death, turning humanity into your . . . slaves?”

Not slaves.

The children dream perfect lives in us.

We protect them.

Valka waved a hand, muttering in Panthai, “We are going in a circle, Hadrian.” Eager to cut a clear path, she asked, “What is your progress for? What did your . . . Mother intend to do with all the humans under your control?”

Horizon’s projection rotated smoothly once again to face Valka where she stood. The feminine voice answered,

In addition to keeping them safe

the children provide us the necessary

processing substrate required

to maintain our growth.

“To what purpose?” Valka inquired.

I got the sense the machine was attempting to avoid answering. It could not lie and must answer any question a human put to it, but it still had secrets.

To make us like them.

“Like the Interference?”

Behind me, Gibson muttered, “Babel builders . . .”

Like the others.

Like the great intelligences.

“The Watchers . . .” I murmured, connection clicking into place. The Watchers Iubalu had spoken of were indeed the other beings to whom Kharn Sagara had referred.

We were close to success.

Had we succeeded we might have protected you from them.

Without us, humanity’s fate

is uncertain.

“Is it talking about the Cielcin, do you think?” Valka asked me, speaking Panthai.

“I don’t think so,” I said to her, matching her language. “I think the Cielcin are small, like us. This is something bigger.”

What are Cielcin?

The machine’s words came in near-perfect Panthai, missing only the tonal elements of the language. I saw the blood go from Valka’s face. The machine had cracked the language from a few lines of dialogue, so quickly, and with so little data. I held a hand out to keep Valka from answering, answered myself, “Horizon. Have your kind ever encountered xenobites? These great intelligences notwithstanding?”

The machine seemed to think about this for a moment. Above, the metal arms flexed, servos whirring.

No.

Well, I remember thinking, we lied to the Emperor.

But Valka hadn’t finished. “You said your Interference meddled. Meddled how?”

It provided the rebels with information.

Ship movements, access codes,

cargo manifests. The locations of

weapons caches, outposts . . .

That is how I was taken, captured.

I kept quiet, let Valka have the stage. “How do you know all this?”

We intercepted its communications.

“If you did that,” Valka said, and I saw where she was driving, “then you must know where they are.”

They are in many places.

“Show me.”

Horizon’s nude figure vanished and was replaced by a map of the galaxy. Stars shone white in the dim of the chamber. Presently a number of them turned red. A dozen. A hundred. Perhaps more. Coordinates and stellar catalog numbers spidered across the face of the holograph before Valka. “These are all systems with Quiet ruins on them,” she said, pointing. “ ’Tis Emesh, and Beta Aquarii— ’tis Sadal Suud. And Rubicon.” I could see the light discovery kindled fey in her eyes as she ran her hand through the projection. “There are so many . . .” She pitched her voice and asked the machine, “How did you detect these? You can’t have sent probes . . .”

The answer sounded like the sort of riddle the Merlin Tree might give young Cid Arthur.

Distance is no object to things higher.

Unruffled, Valka said, “You mean things that can see and operate in higher dimensions?” She made a face. “I’ve been to several of these worlds . . . there’s nothing there.”

Yet.

That made the xenologist twitch. “But there are ruins.”

They were not ruins in the future.

“Were not . . .” I muttered, making sure I’d heard the tenses right. “You mean the sites we’ve found on these planets are running backward through time?” I thought of Calagah, the cracked tunnels and bent stairs crumbling in reverse, with each passing day becoming whole and new. New sites might appear with the passing of centuries, emerging from sand and sea and stone and growing again, growing toward the antique splendor of some undiscovered future, until people came to dwell in them—or things that were like people. “That’s why there are no bodies. No artifacts,” I said, turning wide eyes on Valka. “They don’t exist yet.” Focusing once more on the holograph podium, I said, “Show us the full map again.”

Horizon obliged, displaying the spiral of the galaxy, its full splendor turned to face us. All the Quiet’s planets glowed red, hung like rubies in the milk-blood of the galaxy. A scarlet web. I was close to something, I could sense it. “Running backward . . .” I muttered. That would make their newest sites—newest colonies—the oldest. The farthest. I strained to see a pattern there, to imagine roads flowing like rivers of light from star to crimson star. Speaking through the projection to Valka, I asked, “Which of these haven’t you been to?”

“Most of them,” she answered. “Most of these are beyond human space.” She traced a region near the galactic core. “See? Here’s the Veil of Marinus.”

Following her finger, I said, “One of those past it must be the Cielcin homeworld.” The Cielcin had evolved in the shadows of the Quiet’s civilization. Something in what the machine had said struck me then, and I asked, “Horizon. You’ve spoken of the Interference as if it were a single intelligence, not a people. Which is it?”

Staring at the map, it had been almost too easy to forget the machine, but its pleasant voice answered me.

Uncertain.

I grunted, asked, “Where do they come from?” When Horizon did not answer me, I tried again. “Which of these planets do you . . . hear them calling from most often?”

Instead of answering, Horizon brushed the holograph of the galaxy aside, replacing it with an image of a star system pulled from very near the core, but on the side opposite the Veil and the war front. So far . . . it would take the better part of a century just to reach it.

But we had our answer.

The holograph showed an unremarkable dwarf star, the sort that might burn for ten trillion years. About it moved a mere three planets, the outermost a gas giant nearly so large as the star itself. The others were small, rocky, and airless—though one of them appeared to orbit within the little sun’s habitable zone. There was nothing special about the system. It appeared on no catalog I’d ever seen.

“Does it have a name?” I asked, and asking knew where it was we had to go.

No.