‘Yes,’ Poole said. ‘Of course I have. But I always did like long odds. Quite an adventure, eh?’
Futurity couldn’t help but smile at his reckless optimism. But he stepped up to the window. ‘Michael Poole, please—’
‘What’s wrong, acolyte? Are you concerned about what your Hierocrat is going to do to you when you go home without his intellectual property?’
‘Well, yes. But I’m also concerned for you, Michael Poole.’
Poole did a double-take. ‘You are, aren’t you? I’m touched, Futurity’s Dream. I like you too, and I think you have a great future ahead of you – if you can clear the theological fog out of your head. You could change the world! But on the other hand, I have the feeling you’ll be a fine priest too. I’d like to stick around to see what happens. But, no offence, it ain’t worth going back into cold storage for.’
Mara said, her voice breaking, ‘If you find Sharn, tell her I love her.’
‘I will. And who knows? Perhaps we will find a way to get back in touch with you, some day. Don’t give up hope. I never do.’
‘I won’t.’
‘Just to be absolutely clear,’ said Captain Tahget heavily. ‘Mara, will this be enough for you to get rid of that damn bomb?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Mara. ‘I always did trust Michael Poole.’
‘And she won’t face any charges,’ Poole said. ‘Will she, Captain?’
Tahget looked at the ceiling. ‘As long as I get that bomb off my ship – and as long as somebody pays me for this jaunt – she can walk free.’
‘Then my work here is done,’ said Poole, mock-seriously. He turned and faced the black hole.
‘You’re hesitating,’ Futurity said.
‘Wouldn’t you? I wonder what the life expectancy of a sentient structure in there is … Well, I’ve got a century before the black hole hits Chandra, and maybe there’ll be a way to survive that.
‘I hope I live! It would be fun seeing what comes next, in this human Galaxy. For sure it won’t be like what went before. You know, it’s a dangerous precedent, this deliberate speciation: after an age of unity, will we now live through an era of bifurcation, as mankind purposefully splits and splits again?’ He turned back to Futurity and grinned. ‘And this is my own adventure, isn’t it, acolyte? Something the original Poole never shared. He’d probably be appalled, knowing him. I’m the black sheep! What was that about more real?’
Mara said, ‘I will be with you at Timelike Infinity, Michael Poole, when this burden will pass.’
That was a standard Wignerian prayer. Poole said gently, ‘Yes. Perhaps I’ll see you there, Mara. Who knows?’ He nodded to Futurity. ‘Goodbye, engineer. Remember – open mind.’
‘Open mind,’ Futurity said softly.
Poole turned, leapt away from the ship, and vanished in a shimmering of pixels.
After that, Futurity spent long hours studying the evanescent patterns in the air of the black hole. He tried to convince himself he could see more structure: new textures, a deeper richness. Perhaps Michael Poole really was in there, with Sharn. Or perhaps Michael Poole had already gone on to his next destination, or the next after that. It was impossible to tell.
He gave up, turned to his data desk, and began to work out how he was going to explain all this to the Hierocrat.
With the Shipbuilders swarming through their corridors and access tubes, the ship lifted out of the accretion disc of Chandra, and sailed for Base 478, and then for Earth.
In the end the Ideocracy and the Kardish Imperium inevitably fell on each other.
Such wars of succession consumed millennia and countless lives. It was not a noble age, though it threw up plenty of heroes.
But time exerted its power. The wars burned themselves out. Soon the Coalition with all its works and its legacies was forgotten.
As for the Wignerian religion, it developed into the mightiest and deepest of all mankind’s religions, and brought consolation to trillions. But in another moment it too was quite forgotten.
And humans, flung upon a million alien shores, morphed and adapted.
This was the Bifurcation of Mankind. How it would have horrified that dry old stick Hama Druz! There were still wars, of course. But now different human species confronted each other, and a fundamental xenophobia fuelled genocides.
As poor Rusel on the Mayflower II had understood, human destiny works itself out on overlapping timescales. An empire typically lasts a thousand years – the Coalition was a pathology. A religion may linger five or ten thousand years. Even a human subspecies will alter unrecognisably after fifty or a hundred thousand years. So on the longest of timescales human history is a complex dissonance, with notes sounding at a multitude of frequencies from the purposeful to the evolutionary, and only the broadest patterns are discernible in its fractal churning.
You learn this if you live long enough, like Rusel, like me.
The age of Bifurcation ended abruptly.
Sixty-five thousand years after the conquest of the Galaxy, genetic randomness threw up a new conqueror. Charismatic, monstrous, carelessly spending human life on a vast scale, the self-styled Unifier used one human type as a weapon against another, before one of his many enemies took his life, and his empire disintegrated, evanescent as all those before.
And yet the Unifier planted the seeds of a deeper unity. Not since the collapse of the Coalition had the successors of mankind recalled that their ancestors had shared the same warm pond. After ten thousand more years that unity found a common cause.
Mankind’s hard-won Galaxy was a mere tidal pool of muddy light, while all around alien cultures commanded a wider ocean. Now those immense spaces became an arena for a new war. As in the time of the Unifier, disparate human types were thrown into the conflict; new sub-species were even bred specifically to serve as weapons.
This war continued in various forms for a hundred thousand years. In the end, like the Unifier, mankind was defeated by the sheer scale of the arena – and by time, which erodes all human purposes.
But mankind didn’t return to complete fragmentation, not quite. For now a new force began to emerge in human politics.
The undying. Us. Me.
Since the time of Michael Poole, there had been undying among the ranks of mankind. Some of us were engineered to be so, and others were the children of the engineered. We emerged and died in our own slow generations, a subset of mankind.
The hostility of mortals was relentless. It pushed us together – even if, often, in mutual loathing. But we were always dependent on the mass of mankind. Undying or not, we were still human; we needed our short-lived cousins. We spent most of our long lives hiding, though.
We undying had rather enjoyed the long noon of the Coalition, for all that authority’s persecution of us. Stability and central control was what we sought above all else. To us the Coalition’s collapse, and the churning ages that followed, were a catastrophe.
When, two hundred thousand years after the time of Hama Druz, the storm of extragalactic war at last blew itself out, we decided enough was enough. We had always worked covertly, tweaking history here and there – as I had meddled in the destiny of the Exultants. Now it was different. In this moment of human fragmentation and weakness, we emerged from the shadows, and began to act.