Technicians of the ancient Guild of Virtual Idealism had deployed the most advanced available technology to construct the Virtual Poole. Everything known about Poole and his life and times had been downloaded, and where there were gaps in the knowledge – and there were many – teams of experts, technical, historical and theoretical, had laboured to extrapolate and interpolate. It had been a remarkable project, and somewhat expensive: the Hierocrat wouldn’t say how much it cost, but it seemed the Ecclesia was still paying by instalments.
At last all was ready, and that blue tetrahedral chapel had been built. The Supreme Ecclesiarch had waved her hand – and Michael Poole, or at least a Michael Poole, had opened his eyes for the first time in more than twenty thousand years.
The whole business seemed vaguely heretical to Futurity. But when Poole popped into existence in the Politely’s observation lounge, surrounded by the gaping crew and nervous Ecclesiast technicians, Futurity felt a shiver of wonder.
Poole seemed to take a second to come to himself, as if coming into focus. Then he looked down at his body and flexed his fingers. In the brightness of the deck he seemed oddly out of place, Futurity thought – not flimsily unreal like most Virtuals, but more opaque, more dense, like an intrusion from another reality. Poole scanned the crowd of staring strangers. When he found Futurity’s face he smiled, and Futurity’s heart warmed helplessly.
But Poole’s face was dark, intent, determined. For the first time it occurred to Futurity to wonder what Poole himself might want out of this situation. He was a Virtual, but he was just as sentient as Futurity was, and no doubt he had goals of his own. Perhaps he saw some advantage in this transfer off-world, some angle to be worked.
Poole turned and walked briskly to the big blister-window set in the hull. His head scanned back and forth systematically as he took in the crowded view. ‘So this is the centre of the Galaxy. You damn priests never even let me see the sky before.’
‘Not quite the centre. We’re inside the Core here, the Galaxy’s central bulge.’ Futurity pointed to a wall of light that fenced off half the sky. ‘That’s the Mass – the Central Star Mass, the knot of density surrounding Chandra, the supermassive black hole at the very centre.’
‘Lethe, I don’t know if I imagined people would ever come so far. And for millennia this has been a war zone?’
‘The war is over.’ Futurity forced a grin. ‘We won!’
‘And now humans are killing humans again, right? Same old story.’ Poole inspected the surface of the planet below. ‘A city-world,’ he said dismissively. ‘Seen better days.’ He squinted around the sky. ‘So where’s the sun?’
Futurity was puzzled by the question.
Captain Tahget said, ‘Base 478 has no sun. It’s a rogue planet, a wanderer. Stars are crowded here in the Core, Michael Poole. Not like out on the rim, where you come from. Close approaches happen all the time.’
‘So planets get detached from their suns.’ Poole peered down at the farms that splashed green amid the concrete. ‘No sunlight for photosynthesis. But if the sky is on fire with Galaxy light, you don’t need the sun. Different spectrum from Sol’s light, of course, but I guess they are different plants too…’
Futurity was entranced by these rapid chains of speculation and deduction.
Poole pointed to a shallow crater, a dish of rubble kilometres across, gouged into the built-over surface. ‘What happened there?’
Futurity shrugged. ‘Probably a floating building fell, when the power failed.’
Poole laughed uncomfortably. ‘Layers of history! I don’t suppose I’ll ever know the half of it.’ Now he took in the Ask Politely’s bubbling organic form. ‘And what kind of starship is this?’ At random he pointed at hull features, at spines and spires and shields. ‘What is that for? An antenna, a sensor mast? And that? It could be a ramjet scoop, I guess. And that netting could be an ion drive.’
There was a stirring of discomfort. Futurity said, ‘We don’t ask such questions. It’s the business of the Captain and his crew.’
Poole raised his eyebrows, but he got only a blank stare from Captain Tahget. ‘Demarcation of knowledge? I never did like that. Gets in the way of the scientific method. But it’s your millennium.’ He clapped his hands. ‘OK, so I’m here. Maybe we should get to work before your fruitcake in steerage blows us all up.’
The Ecclesia technicians muttered among themselves, and prepared Poole’s relocation.
Futurity watched the scene in Tahget’s fish-tank Virtual viewer. Mara’s cabin looked just as it had before: the woman sitting patiently on the bed, the dresser, and the bomb sitting on the floor, grotesquely out of place. All that was different was a tray on top of the dresser with the remains of a meal.
Poole appeared out of nowhere, a little manikin figure in the fish-tank. Mara sat as if frozen.
Poole leaned down, resting his hands on his knees, and looked into her face. ‘You’re exhausted. Your eyes are pissholes in the snow.’ Nobody in Tahget’s office had ever seen snow; the translation routines had to interpret.
Poole snapped his fingers to conjure up a Virtual chair and sat down. Mara bowed down before him. ‘Take it easy,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to dry my feet with your hair.’ Another archaic reference Futurity didn’t understand. ‘I know I’m tangled up in your myths. But I’m just a man. Actually, not even that.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Mara said thickly, straightening up.
‘For what? You’re the real person here, with the real problem.’ He glanced at the sullen mass of the bomb.
Mara said, ‘I made them bring you here. Now I don’t know what to say to you.’
‘Just talk. I don’t think anybody understands what you want, Mara. Not even that bright kid Futurity.’
‘Who? Oh, the acolyte. I told them, but they didn’t listen.’
‘Then tell me.’ He laughed. ‘I’m the sleeping beauty. Lethe knows I’ve got no preconceptions.’
‘I want to go home. I didn’t want to leave in the first place. They evacuated us by force.’
He leaned forward. ‘Who did?’
‘The troops of the new Kard.’
‘Who … ? Never mind; I’ll figure that out. OK. But home for you is a planetoid orbiting a black hole. Yes? A satellite black hole, born in the accretion disc of the monster at the heart of the Galaxy.’ He rubbed his chin. ‘Quite a place to visit. But who would want to live there?’
Mara sat up straighter. ‘I would. I was born there.’
It had been a project of the first years after mankind’s victory in the centre of the Galaxy, Mara told him. With the war won, the ancient Coalition, the government of a united mankind, abruptly crumbled, and successor states emerged across the Galaxy. A rump remnant of the Coalition that called itself the Ideocracy had clung on to Earth and other scattered territories. And at the Core, the scene of mankind’s greatest victory, a new project was begun. Ideocrat engineers had gathered asteroids and ice moons which they had set spinning in orbit around the satellite black holes which studded Chandra’s accretion disc. One such was the rock Mara called Greyworld.
‘You say you were born there?’
‘Yes,’ Mara said. ‘And my parents, and their parents before them.’
Poole stared at her. Then, in Futurity’s view, Poole’s little figure walked to the edge of the fish-tank viewer, and stared up challengingly. ‘Hey, acolyte. Help me out here. I’m having a little trouble with timescales.’