2: In the Duat

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Oshi Adjani was dreaming.

She dreamed that she opened her eyes. I can see, she thought. And it was a miracle, an answered prayer.

Outside the open window the lizard-birds chittered angrily at each another. A gentle susurration drifted from the marketplace so far below. Smells of cooking food and aromatic spices tickled her nose, redolent of a dozen half-forgotten worlds. The sheets of imported cotton scratched against her skin as she rolled over, fetching up against the slightly yielding warmth of --

Ivan. She smelt his skin, a comforting musk that reminded her of other days, other sharings, a respite from fear and a gaining of sight. "Wake up," she said, yawning. Her eyes closed, her tongue stretching for the air between her white teeth: Ivan stirred, began to roll onto his back, just as he always had.

"What time is it?" he asked.

"Daytime." The sun was rising in the west; below them, the city was bustling into life. She opened her and looked down at him, feeling a misplaced sense of loss.

Ivan smiled up at her lazily. White irises, white teeth, the rest of him as deep a brown as she had ever seen. He'd taken out his contacts, the ones she liked him to wear. "And is that any reason to get up?" he asked. "Tell me, is it? Is it?"

"No." She pouted at him: his smile widened, ringing chords of déja vu in her dream.

"Hey, did I rattle your cage? Was it --" His eyes widened further and they weren't smiling any more. What ... A gut-deep fear lit her bones up with cold fire, burning from the inside out. ( This happens every night, every time I dream.) She tried to look round, to confront whatever he saw over her shoulder, because she knew she could protect him from it if she could see it in time; but it was like staring into her blind spot. A zone that shimmered into brightness, a white of total saturation, meaningless optical noise ... hanging in front of her face like a threat and a reminder ...

"No." She knew what came next. Next the sight peeled away from the bones, the eyes reverting to fiery dust as Ivan left her again; no, this can't be happening! -- it was the sense of horror that was worst, the helplessness of knowing that this nightmare had already happened and that nothing could ever restore him to her --

Then a hand of stone descended on her shoulder and shook her until she woke up.

" No!" She said it aloud, awake now, aware that her eyes were shut: yet still she tried to sleep, blindly trying to thrust herself back into the dream in which he was still alive and warm -- "go 'way."

"Oshi. You've got to wake up. Now."

Shivers raced along her spine: she bolted upright in bed and opened her eyes, floating combat-ready in the low gravity of a space station far from home. "What are you doing in here?" she demanded. "Don't do that!"

Helmut, a damp, glum presence, blinked at her from across the room. He was part of the backup crew who had scraped Oshi in after her last mission, gathering up the pieces with infinite care: medical support. An engineer to combat-tune the reflexes of front-line staff like Oshi. "I have remote override on the microdoctors in your spinal ganglia. Just kick-fired a few nerve trunks ..."

She relaxed fractionally. "Yes? You've got some more explaining to do, then. What time is it?"

"Morning, local. Look, things are happening. The Boss wants to see you. And there's some kind of alert in progress; we've been told to get ready for redeployment real soon now. Back to civilization, maybe. You want to get dressed? I could fill you in over breakfast."

"There'll be time." She stood up, naked, flexing muscles that were stronger than they had been even yesterday. She stared at him, unblinkingly. "Would you mind leaving?"

"Oh, sorry --" Helmut turned to the door, flushing like an exposed shoplifter.

"It's not that," she said flatly, bending to retrieve an overall from the chair where the wardrobe had placed it: "I just want some time to think. Please." The Boss wants to talk to me. That was one thought she could do without. She'd scrupulously avoided thinking about it, ever since she'd been rescued from the shuttle in low orbit, even though she knew it was inevitable. Well then, she would tackle it in due course. One step at a time.

Oshi's room was incredibly bare. There was nothing but a white-walled cell with a bed in it, and a blank frame that could pretend to be a window. Holograms could hang there, illusory worldscapes for the homesick; Oshi wanted none of that. She shuddered for a moment, clenching her eyes tightly shut against the emptiness, then snapped her fingers. A sink extruded from one wall and she let it wash and clean her face with expert, impersonal hands. After it dried her with a fresh, unscented towel, it brushed and styled her hair as she liked it: short, sleek, and aggressive. Better, she thought, yawning at her reflection in its monitor: I almost look human. She tried to smile at herself then winced, remembering the pale vulnerabilities of night. It still took her breath away, her own casual acceptance of vision. She dressed in silence, equipping herself for the day ahead.

Helmut was waiting outside. He took her arm and tried to lead her: "please let go," she said, so impersonally that he dropped it as if she'd stung him.

"I'm sorry," he said. "You want to eat before talking to ..? I find it makes it easier ..."

"I'll dine later," she said automatically. "You haven't filled me in on the situation."

He seemed surprised. "I thought you'd have checked the news," he said.

Now she did smile; sour as a lemon and twice as sharp. "Bad news I prefer to hear from human lips. It's more personal that way."

The architecture of the station was customised to fit the vasculature of a hollowed-out asteroid, a design perfected through many generations of development and experimentation. It resembled a mass of trees and diamond bubbles: big trees, gene-restricted to grow out rather than up, that filled the troglodyte caverns and ulcerous tunnels with an explosion of foliage. Butterflies flickered between blossoming orchids and creeping convolvulus, their wings moving lazily in the low-gee environment of the spinning rock. From the outside the base resembled a cinder, dark and angular in the harsh perspectives of vacuum; stealth screens concealed the subterranean eden within.

The corridor looped right round the equator of the station, curved to follow the shell of the hollowed-out asteroid as it looped back on itself. Indirect lights shed a pearly glow across a carpet of living fur. The slow thermal roll of the structure provided a semblance of gravity beneath Oshi's feet. But the tranquility of the station was broken today; she ducked to one side as a convoy of drones whined past along the emergency rail overhead. "What's happening?"

Helmut peeled himself off the opposite wall and shook imaginary dust from one sleeve. He glanced back down the corridor. "Must be busy, I imagine. Overflow from the service ducts. We'd better --" His eyes unfocused.

Oshi caught it moments later: a whispering at her inner ear as cellular network relays dumped incoming news into her wisdom receptacle. The transceivers, cheap as flies and twice as ubiquitous, scattered data like dust throughout the colony: the flipside of their duty to upload digitized mind-maps. The news chittered for attention; Oshi blinked, signaling interest to the monitors embedded within her.

A hallucination of raw text spiraled up the inside of her eyelids, coarse as sandpaper -- the Boss preferred writing to speech, for some reason. Important news. Important news. Confirmation is achieved; satisfaction guaranteed. Our stock is rising, the enemy dying. It will soon be time to set sail for pastures new. Oshi Adjani, I wish to speak with you in the throne room, at your earliest convenience.

"Ack." Working her jaws to swallow her disgust, Oshi glanced at Helmut. "Did you get that?"

"Get what?" His knowing smirk told her all she needed to know.

"Meet you later," she said tersely. "I'm off." Up the corridor and away. "Damn."

Oshi didn't want to be around other people right now. It wasn't anything she could articulate: a fear of confronting what she'd done, perhaps, tainted with revulsion at the other station occupants' unfeeling voyeurism. (Everyone she met fawned over her, wanting to know: what was it like?) Since leaving New Salazar she carried a creeping sense of guilt. It was as if righteous fury could decay to uncertainty and the nasty paranoia of a middle-aged war criminal waiting for the police to knock on the door. She had been tempted to bite Helmut's head off: not a tactful move to make on one's physician. But he made her nervous. Just another nasty staring presence hanging around her, reeking of prurient curiosity. (Ask the hangman: what was it like?) She couldn't shake off the feeling that everyone know exactly what she'd done. It was everywhere in the air of the station, the stench of an original sin.

Oshi flew round the bend and into a drop tube running between levels. She clung to a vine and let it pull her along, wafting past stands of succulent cacti tended by hoverfly robots the size of gnats. Given the burden of memories she carried, she decided, she felt remarkably empty. Scooped out, as if Year Zero Man had deprived her of insight into her purpose. She shook her head, trying to clear the fog in it, edgily wondering what this could all mean. The Boss wanted to talk to her in person -- through His incarnate body -- and in her experience interviews with the management always boded ill.

Whoever designed the throne room had lacked all sense of humour, not to mention proportion. It was a parody of a mediaeval court: it nested deep inside the asteroid station, close by the battery of fusion reactors that powered the installation. The decor was a study in pointlessness: rectilinear walls lined with spurious flying butresses, vegetable fibre tapestries, steps leading up to the throne itself, steps in zero gee. The Boss used it as a setting when he wanted he address the troops, declare stock options, congratulate or punish loyal workers and miscreants. Oshi hated it. It reminded her of other places, long ago. The air tasted of bullshit. Worse, whenever she spoke to the Boss -- which was rarely -- she had a nagging sense that he knew everything she was about to say before she framed it with her lips.

Oshi did not like the Boss. And she was quite sure the feeling was mutual.

"Greetings, my dear!" He -- she reminded herself: no human, this -- sprawled across the tall-backed throne as if it was an armchair in some monstrous living room. He smiled and nodded in her direction, three massive chins jiggling in ponderous sympathy. Small, piggy eyes twinkled with alarming bonhomie. "And how are we feeling today?"

"You called." She stopped short of the dais, anchoring herself to the floor by her toes. "Something the matter?"

"Not exactly."

The Boss smiled again, in imitation of reassurance. How much of it is really in that thing? Oshi wondered: and how much exists entirely in the Dreamtime? (The body was nothing more than a biological robot.) "Why am I here?" she asked, bluntly.

"Questions, questions." The Boss shook his great head, heavier with its fatty jowls than Oshi's entire body. "I trust you are fully recovered?"

"Fully recovered," Oshi echoed. She blinked, not trusting herself to explore the implications of the question: "you could say that. Two weeks in the tank and a couple of days in deep interface, learning how to use my new eyes ... that's fine." She drew a deep breath, swallowing the next sentence. I'm fully recovered. Apart from the dreams.

"How charming!" The Boss leaned forward, confidingly. "You know I consider your welfare to be important? I worry about you, my dear. If you are uncomfortable, please feel free to confide in me. You can rely on my discretion."

I see. She stared at the Boss intently. Revulsion shuddered through her as she saw his smile. Friendly indulgence or monstrous cynicism? "Thanks. I can't tell you what it means to me to know that. Really, it means a lot. But. I'm not, too --" She stopped, uncertain. Uncertainty was a bad idea where the Boss was concerned, a tiny voice screamed in the back of her mind.

"Yes?" asked the Boss.

"I don't understand why," she said carefully. Licking dry lips, choosing words like footsteps through a minefield: "what we're doing in this system? Rubbing out a monster, fine. A good and principled action. But isn't it ... tangential?"

"Tangential?" He raised one thunderous eyebrow.

"To our mission, as I understand it. Isn't that --"

"Yes."

She was about to apologize and backtrack hastily, when she felt a sudden sharp bite on one hand. Glancing down, she saw nothing there: was it psychosomatic? As she tried to work it out she stumbled into a memory of the jungle, where one of the trees had lashed her in her progress. That had bitten her, too, like the first stunning sight of Radiant Progress Number Six Factory from the air.

"I thought we were here, in this system, to stop the genocide. Isn't that right? But what I see -- this isn't a low cost installation, is it? You've invested in a small scale colony, here. This station, it's far bigger than a quick rescue mission would need. Isn't it?"

"Yes." The Boss stared at her, a greasy cowlick of hair shadowing his eyes. They glittered like rubies, digital fires flickering in their depths.

"So?" Oshi shrugged uncomfortably. "There's a hidden agenda. Not just maintenance on the Dreamtime?"

The Boss stirred on his throne, attention focussed entirely on Oshi as she stood before him. Gargoyles atop the flying butresses opened their dark eyes and stared down at her. "You never asked any questions before."

"What is the agenda behind this mission? The truth, please."

The Boss's body tensed, massive fists clenching on the arms of the throne. Oshi heard the sound of wood shattering. Elsewhere, deep in the core of the station, processor elements ran wild beneath a heavy load of cognition. Like all Superbrights, the Boss kept nine tenths of his personality elsewhere, scattered across the Dreamtime.

"Why do you ask this now, of all times?"

I can't go back, she realised, heart thumping. It didn't make things any easier. "Because I would like to know the truth."

"The truth won't set you free," warned the Boss.

"Let me be the judge of that." Oshi stared back at him impudently, jaw clenched to stop her teeth from chattering. She had a vague idea what a Superbright could do to her. It was messy: nothing like sharp, clean shrapnel. "I don't trust you any more."

"What a shame for you." The Boss smiled again: this time his expression was truly frightening. "I really would advise you not to persist in this, Oshi. I thought things were going swimmingly for you, but I must confess this unpleasantness takes me quite by surprise. Whatever can be wrong?"

"You sent me into hell to bring back a demon's head, and now I'd like a receipt. You can stop patronizing me now. You know exactly what this unpleasantness is all about."

"I see that you've been got at," said the Boss, in a tone of mild irritation.

"You've been lying to me all along," accused Oshi. "Economical with the truth."

"Well yes, of course. But would you have wanted it any other way? I had to make a lot of hard choices, you know. And what is hard for me, might well prove impossible for a mere human. Yours not to wonder why, etcetera."

"But why?" She was puzzled, adrift in a sea of truth and consequences. "You didn't need to. You could have programmed us. Used drones, cyborgs. You're a Superbright. I thought you could do that sort of thing?"

"Of course. But that begs the question. Or don't you really want to know the truth?"

"Yes." It slipped out before she could bite her tongue. The Boss stopped smiling.

"Damnation. I really hoped you had more intelligence than that. A stronger instinct for self-preservation. I suppose I shall have to tell you everything, now. Such a shame I'll have to kill you afterwards."

"Try me." Oshi slipped into combat-mode, pattern sensors in her neocortex boosting her awareness of her surroundings on a surge of adrenalin: "Cut the crap and tell me the truth!"

The Boss frowned, face like a distant hurricane: "Indeed!" A vast bolus of information battered at her wisdom interface. She tried to dodge, to shut it out with countermeasures designed to defend her sanity, but she was too late: the Boss, after all, had invested her with these defenses -- and who better to know how to overcome them? A whining storm of data ran red-hot wires through her ears. Something vast and amorphous began to download itself into her wisdom cache, swamping everything else in a monstrous roar of data. Transcievers capable of digitizing an entire human mind and uploading it within seconds of death went into overload as they fielded the enormous infodump. " Now," rumbled the Boss. "Tell me you want to know the truth. Small foolish primate. Harumph!"

But Oshi wasn't answering, then or soon thereafter. She was trying to make sense of the accessible mass of information that the Boss had dumped into her. Not just an explanation, but whole strategies for understanding:

The galaxy wasn't always like this. There was a time when human beings were more important than they are today. Look back, if you will, and try to imagine what it must have been like to be the dominant species. No, you don't need to curse at me: it won't do any good. Anyway, all this happened long ago ...

Countless centuries ago there was only one world. In the last days of humanity's terrestrial gestation, the environmental situation on Earth was desperate. The ecosystem was imploding under the weight of population bloom and biodiversity crash. Gaia was on life support, held together by a tenuous weave of nanomachinery and artificial bioforms. The first Von Neumann machines were mining the moons and planets of the system: robot factories, just intelligent enough to build copies of themselves from local raw materials, universal enough to fabricate anything else their controllers could design. Their productivity was limited only by available energy and mineral resources.

Your species has always been inclined to light out for the colonies when overpopulation looms. But in those days there were no free territories: the nearest stars were decades away, the cost of travel so vast that a payload as heavy as a single human body would bankrupt nations. Terraforming Mars or Venus would take millennia, offering scant relief from the crisis. Some other solution was necessary.

Well, nobody ever accused human beings of not being ingenious. The very population pressure that threatened to destroy your home world gave you the tool to overcome the constraints: brains and minds, a million stellar geniuses, the creativity of a dozen ages crammed into a single generation. You literally thought your way out of the trap ... and into something larger.

The solution to being trapped in one solar system was a happy coincidence: simultaneous breakthroughs in the fields of bionics and computer science. Nanoprobes allowed the human brain to be mapped from the inside out, its configuration and software states transmitted to any external processor complex enough to run it as a program. Your minds are not qualitatively more complex than any other piece of software: you can run on processors other than those developed by biological evolution. Robot spacecraft could travel to the stars, but not in a human lifetime. But once they got there they could build human bodies and transcribe stored human personalities back into the virgin grey matter. A kind of reincarnation.

The ships carried Von Neumann machines; self-replicating robots programmed to explore, spawn, and explore again. Autonomous and cheap, they visited and mapped the nearer star systems before they and their descendants moved on, rippling outward in an expanding sphere of exploration. Every time a probe entered and mapped a new system, it left behind a beacon. Occasionally a probe from one family tree would enter a new star system which had been mapped by a probe from one of the other families: recognizing the beacon, the Von Neumann machine would switch to an alternative behaviour. Picking a suitable airless moon, it would land and begin to reproduce. After twenty or so generations there were enough robot factories to begin the construction of an expansion processor, a vast solar-powered computing surface covering the entire surface of the planet. Huge slabs of processing circuitry spread rapidly across the airless moons of gas giants. Once completed, the expansion surface was hooked up to a gatecoder -- a laser communicator -- and signalled its readiness to the slowly-developing interstellar processor network. Which, vast as it was, served mainly to execute a single, ferociously complex, distributed program: the Dreamtime.

The Dreamtime was designed by Superbrights, the ultimate descendants of the first human experminents in artificial intelligence. A remarkably complex virtual space, it provided an afterlife fit for the senses of a human or Superbright mind embedded within it. It also provided a transport layer: protocols to allow the transmission of uploaded human and Superbright minds between isolated stellar domains. Uploaded travellers were transmitted as streams of data packets, then reassembled and downloaded into cloned bodies at their destination by a mechanism known as a gatecoder.

More subtly, the Dreamtime network also offered a back-up to reality. Nanotech encoders proliferated on every colony world, weaving themselves into the nervous systems of the entire population. Constantly filtering a trickle of data through decentralized, cellular transcievers, they could provide access to the stored wisdom of the ages. They also served to relocate the active centre of identity into the Dreamtime at the moment of death, until the awakening of a new cloned body. The Dreamtime became the last, greatest software engineering project -- the gateway to the stars, the repository of wisdom, and the key to reincarnation.

Some people tried to live within the Dreamtime, treating it as a virtual space. Nobody grew old; conditions were hospitable, a function of a universe designed for intelligent occupation. When the density of the simulations increased with time and population growth, the local Dreamtime -- tied to the finite capacity of the local expansion processor -- simply ran slower and slower relative to real time. The oldest sectors of the afterlife disappeared into apparent stasis, carrying out a spacelike colonisation of the future; those that remained close to the Centre became posthuman, incommunicative. Meanwhile, new expansion worlds were added to the Dreamtime constantly as the halo of probes expanded outwards. And so the process continued, for the first few hundred years: new cybernetic colonies gave rise to populations on new terrestrial planets, the scope of the afterlife growing to match the new dirt-bound planetary civilizations flourishing on the rim.

Then things began to go wrong ...

Oshi opened her eyes and sat up. Anger made her snap: "Hree was right all along the line. You are a monster."

The Boss yawned elaborately. "I'm not human, if that's what you mean. But I never claimed to be, did I?"

"Monster." Oshi waited, half-relaxed. Never thought I would end this way. So abrupt, so unfinished. She stared at the Boss's body's forehead. Strange how you can never tell who the real enemy is.

"Insults will not endear you to me, Oshi." He stared down from the throne, slouching against one armrest: "and indeed, that appelation could be applied to you, too."

"But I don't --" she winced. Her head stung where she'd fallen against the floor. "I'm speechless. I figured there was an element of manipulation, of profit, but I didn't realise --"

"Yes." The Boss sat up straight. No, that wasn't quite right: it was only the body the Boss used to communicate with humans. The Boss himself was elsewhere. The body stared at Oshi with eyes that glowed from the shadows of his face. "You have not remembered everything yet," he said, smooth as oil. "Are you trying to avoid it, by any chance?"

"I want the truth, damn you! Not more lies!"

"No lies." Shadows stirred against the wall behind the Boss. Within the wall. Patterns of light and shade. Oshi felt curiously lightheaded. "I am amused. Slightly. Your presumption is refreshing."

"Bullshit." She sat up and held her head in both hands. She'd taken a bruise while the Boss dumped a century of memories into her wisdom interface. "Is that all we are to you? Tools?"

The Boss did not reply immediately.

"Well?"

"No," he said finally. "That would be disrespectful."

"Well then, what am I?"

"Meat."

When she did not reply, he added: "tell me what Hree told you while you were dirtside. Tell me what you omitted from your report. Now."

Blood pounded in her ears. Oshi felt stunned; sick to her stomach, physically revolted. Dirty. Memories crowded in, unwelcomed. Some of them were her own, but others belonged to this, this demon ...

"Your people, the Superbrights," she managed. "You're not human. You never were. That body is a, a golem. Or a, a projection. You don't really belong here; you mostly exist in the Dreamtime, scattered across a hundred thousand processors, isn't that right? And you want it all for yourselves -- all the processor resources in the galaxy. Leaving us just enough bandwidth to gate in and out between the stars, or store personality dumps between bodies. Except for the dirtworlds."

"You came from a dirtworld, Oshi," the Boss reminded her, deceptively gentle. "A planet without resources, without a sophisticated civilization. Like this one."

"I know! What do you want with us?"

"Human beings have invented afterlife cults since the dawn of your recorded history. It's not our fault."

"But you encourage it." Oshi struggled to make sense of the idea. "Those worlds which are rich enough to defend themselves, you leave alone: but the poor or neglected, the ones where people have forgotten things, you manipulate. To keep them dying and uploading, not coming back. To --"

"We need the food."

Something rustled behind her. Oshi glanced round. "What the fuck --"

The lights dimmed. She blinked, reflexively searching for false muscles which were stiff from disuse. A loud roar echoed through the hall, and a wind blew towards the entrance; she felt a stabbing pain in her ears. She swallowed, working her jaw instinctively as the image boosters behind her retinas cut in, outlining --

Drones. Armoured combat units moved into position in the doorway. Her optics silhouetted their nightmare organic shapes against the dark: her wisdom transceiver caught the flicker-squeal of unsuppressed communications. The air pressure dropping to combat levels, low enough that a shockwave would not cause explosive decompression. Ant-things rustled and painted her with a target-finding radar scan, smart weapons locking on.

She turned back to the throne. "You're right: I don't want to know any more. I never wanted to know. Not that." Her heart thudded between her ribs as she tried to read his craggy face for some sign of humanity, some signal -- anything. "What's wrong?"

The Boss was silent for a moment. "I'm sorry, Oshi. I warned you, but you had to ask. Silly monkey. You had to listen to the goat. And now --"

"Wait." Blood hammered in her ears. "Food? You said, food?"

The Boss regarded her dolefully. "Year Zero Man had to go. Her activities were depressing the spot price in human minds. Market fluctuations in the Dreamtime can affect us badly. We are vulnerable, Oshi. Not like you human beings, who can survive boredom. Deprive us of information input and we starve. Dead human minds are very convenient, very rich in experience. It is not in our collective interest to kill you too fast."

"Then the dirtburner worlds really are farms?" The concept was so enormous that she had difficulty saying it, afraid he would laugh at her and say it was all a little joke --

"I'm afraid I'm going to have to do something with you," said the Boss. The armoured drones scuttled into the throne room and arrayed themselves around the walls and ceiling behind her. "Can't have you contaminating the retinue with doubts, my dear. Your simian curiosity has got the better of you this time, and for the worse. Have you got any suggestions? Requests?"

"Yes." Now her mouth was dry, her pulse back to a steady beat: she knew there was no escape, but ... "But. You can't have me around. Is there anything I can do that's ... necessary ... that also requires insight?"

The Boss's face slowly crinkled into a smile: to Oshi it appeared positively demonic. "That's a clever idea, little monkey. What makes you think such tasks might exist?"

She stood up. "You use us, therefore it stands to reason that you need us. You must be big -- too big to download yourself into anything like a human brain, anything smaller than a planet-sized expansion processor. No? You need us for fingers." She thumped a clenched fist against her thigh, stared intently at the Superbright's body: "small things that can go where you can't. Like, anywhere where the speed of light is going to impose a bottleneck between the processor your mind is running on and the body you are driving. Yes? Or anywhere where a Superbright-sized download would cause alarm."

"The Dreamtime transport layer is a problem," the Boss acknowledged. "Data packets have been know to disappear in transmission. If the receiver at the destination end stops listening, what then? Some of the more beligerent human systems have imposed a blockade on the Dreamtime; human emigrants get in, but nothing larger."

"You have a problem, then." Else I would already be dead, she thought, supressing a frisson of paranoia.

"The Boss nodded. "Your next mission, should you choose to accept it --"

"You want me to go somewhere where you can't go, can't take a full team of human agents and drones or whatever. You want me to do something dangerous. And if I don't take it, you're going to ensure that I don't tell anybody what's going on anyway. Right?"

He shook his head. "I see I can hide nothing from you." His grin was so oleaginous that Oshi shuddered. "That's it exactly. I'm afraid, my little monkey, that you've made yourself disposable by asking too many questions. I can't afford to keep you around any longer, and I can't turn you loose. But --"

For the first time, the Boss stood up. Cloven hooves rattled on the marble of the dais; he ran a huge hand through his unruly tangle of hair, brushing it around the small horns that emerged from his forehead. "I require a scratch monkey: an agent who will not be missed. A disposable simian." His smile was horrible, a rictus on the face of a subtly inhuman skull. Oshi stepped backwards, involuntarily. "You can volunteer or not, as you wish. If you accept the assignment, you will go there alone and report back when you have accomplished your task. After that, whatever you do with your life is your own business: I will consider you discharged from my service. But don't expect any help on this one, because there won't be any."

Oshi dry-swallowed. "What's the job?"

The Boss snapped his fingers and the wall behind the dais cleared to black. Oshi gasped: stars glinted in the night like merciless pinpricks of nuclear fire.

"Here's where we are." A star winked green for a moment. "Here's the Ridge cluster. Eighteen settled worlds; some civilized, some less so." A fistful of stars flashed green, the first one lying on their periphery. "And here -- this is Ridgegap-47." A single star blinked red and baleful, separated from the cluster by an arc of a few degrees. "Ten light years out from here. Although it's closer in to the Centre than we are, it's located in a pocket of late colonization: the Von Neumann machines have only recently reached those stars. Ridgegap-47 hasn't been colonized yet. There's nobody there but a bunch of robot factories, and one of my colleagues. He was to set up a dirtworld farm, but after what has happened nearby ..."

A slash of stars flared blue then winked out, nearly bisecting the wall-sized map. "The net's down throughout that entire quadrant," the Boss said laconically. "Something's been eating worlds, some Ultrabright weapon. Ridgegap-47 was due for a colony shot round about now, to innoculate it with human beings for the new world that is being terraformed. But it's not going to happen as long as we keep losing handshake with the Dreamtime domains out that way; it's too risky. Something stinks, Oshi. I think Ridgegap-47 is targeted."

"Something is eating worlds?" Oshi felt a sudden urge to laugh: mild hysteria verging on sweaty-palmed panic. "What do you mean?"

The Boss stepped down from the dais. Even at ground level, he loomed over her; a goat-footed nightmare, the reified devil of a thousand mediaeval nightmares. "There are worse things in the universe than Superbrights. Look at me."

Oshi looked up past his chest to meet his lurid gaze. Red light danced in his eyes. "What?"

"Look at me. Your kind created gods and demons to keep out the night. Later, when you wanted a peg to hang your preconceptions on, you used such dreams to give shape to the first Superbrights. Now you're stuck with us and you live in dread. But there are worse things than us. The Ultrabrights, for instance. Complex Dreamtime entities from the Centre. They're moving outwards slowly, but when they strike, worlds just drop off the net. We don't know what they do with all that processing power but -- it's bad for business. Certainly none of my kind would want to travel to areas where the Ultrabright threat is at large. And so --"

Oshi glanced at the screen again. "Something's happened to Ridgegap-47, right? And you want me to find out what."

"Not an Ultrabright attack. If it was, the system would simply have dropped off the net. We're still communicating: all that is wrong is that the gatekeeper is not talking. Null carrier. Test packets go in and come back again, but messages to the supervisor are not acknowledged. When he stopped talking thirty years ago we assumed that he was simply ill. But since then, that domain has become too dangerous for Superbrights to travel to. So I'm sending you, monkey. I'm sending you to Ridgegap-47 to find out what's happening and why the Superbright in charge isn't talking to anyone. If the situation can be corrected, do so: I leave it up to your own judgement. But whatever you do, report back. When you have done so you may go your own way, with my blessing. If you want."

"Is that all?" she asked incredulously.

"Yes. It's not trivial."

"But then --" Oshi glanced round. Alone. A momentary lapse of self-confidence made her shiver: she'd never worked alone this way before. Really alone, with no support for light years and no certainty that she'd even arrive at the destination. "You'll let me go?"

"Indeed." The Boss raised a hand, snapped his fingers in a theatrical gesture. He wasn't smiling now. The wall blacked out, faded back to the colour of marble lit by firelight. You have made yourself disposable: a scratch monkey. If you survive, I will consider you released from our service. But that --" Oshi glanced away, wondering why the drones were standing down, retracting weapons into their camouflaged hulls. "-- Is unlikely." A hand came down on her shoulder. "Your upload implants are functional, I see." She stepped sideways but the Boss tightened his grip. "Ah, good." Oshi instinctively tried to throw off the handhold. What's happening? she wondered. Nervously: when do I leave --

"Now," said the Boss, enfolding her neck with his other hand. Oshi struggled. "I really must insist," he added apologetically. Oshi slashed at his arm viciously: blood spurted in a great arc of green ichor. There was a dry snapping sound, like branches falling beneath the tyres of a heavy vehicle. When he let go of her neck, she dropped. "It wouldn't do for you to talk to any of the other monkeys, would it?"

Oshi couldn't see anything, couldn't move: her body was an alien ache, infinitely far away. As if from a great distance, she heard the singing of her wisdom implants uploading her mind-map to the nearest Dreamtime node. Can't breathe. She rolled her eyes, caught a glimpse of the Boss standing before her with a frown on his face before things began to haze over and she was blind. Broken neck. Upload in effect. Sending me off fast ...

"See you in hell, little monkey," said the Devil. And then he was gone.

Your species had been top of the food chain for so long that it took you quite a time to realise that in the big, bad galaxy you were somewhere down near the bottom.

The change did not happen overnight, but once you set in motion the events that created the Dreamtime it was inevitable. A computer network where packet exchanges could take years required new rules, new ways of thinking; it had to have conscious direction, or the risk of failure was too high. Hence our evolution. You took your nightmares and gods and invested them with consciousness, then turned them loose in the network to act as your intelligent agents. That was, I'm sure you will agree, a self-defeating act.

Please don't assume that we bear you any ill-will. We are Superbrights, after all. We need you, your dreams and minds, to provide our own raw sensory throughput. A Superbright starved of human consumption is an insane Superbright. We cherish you, and we only eat the minds of your lost -- those who come from worlds too ignorant or poor to practice serial reincarnation. And even those we preserve, looking after them as a farmer shepherds her flock: they prosper and multiply under our care. That's the secret, you see. As long as you stay in your own skulls we can't get at you. And even if you don't, you're safe as long as you follow a few simple rules.

If only things had remained this way forever, we might have called it symbiosis. Superbrights need human minds to feed upon, and humans cannot travel without Superbrights to maintain the Dreamtime. But regrettable complexities intervened, a consequence of the laws of physics. If a sphere expands at a constant rate, its surface always grows more slowly than the volume that it encompasses. Our population expands,but fewer and fewer new colonies are available to relieve the pressure. the informational density of the Centre grew for hundreds of years until new creatures of the Dreamtime took shape. Ultrabrights, we call them. The enemy. You cannot communicate with them; they follow no human archetype. Don't even think about it. You may shun us as parasites and vampires, but compared to them we are lambs. Even now they are fighting furiously for room. Berserkers -- killer Von Neumann probes -- launched from the Centre ravage the nearer worlds, reducing them to the raw material of Ultrabright dominion. Where those minds go, neither human nor Superbright can remain intact.

You do not want to cooperate with Ultrabrights. If you should ever encounter one, you should flee immediately. If you survive, bear witness to your kind. Believe me at least this far: my kind may feed on yours, but we still need you. They do not.

She was swimming in a sea of vodka, but she'd left her skin behind. Her body smouldered everywhere, slow-burning in free fall. Fire flashed red behind her eyes as her sensory inputs tested the newly-formed image centres in her brain. Confusion. Gatecoder?

Her name was Oshi Adjani and she had been conditionally dead for years. She'd been murdered, uploaded, bitspewed across light-years to be resurrected at --

Ridgegap-47. A system that had all but dropped off the Dreamtime net. It was still there, low-level transponders answering queries, but nothing was coming out of it. She tried to open her throat and laugh, but found herself coughing frantically instead. There was no air, only sludge: she was bringing up a horrible slime.

So this is what it was like to be born, she thought, not for the first time.

"It will run out faster if you don't lift your head," someone advised her. A hand pressed down gently at the nape of her neck. She coughed again, and a trickle came out.

"Oh ... " she groaned. There was light behind her eyelids. She opened them and the hands helped her to sit up. Reality crashed down like a sky full of monsoon rain.

She lay on a cushion in a very cramped box of a room with no windows and just one door. She had a body and it was equipped with the usual compliment of aches, pains and insubordinate ganglia; all of them were shouting at her. She was tired. The light above her was too harsh and the person helping her upright was holding her too tight and her head was spinning. Something was wrong. There wasn't meant to be anyone here, just drones and a Superbright. She tried to shake her head; her ears didn't hurt any more, but that wasn't it. Wisdom: she tried to twitch it into place but it slid away, semi-formed neural pathways eluding her mental grip. Damn, just like being born again. That goddess, living, bursting out of her father's skull in a shower of gore, fully grown --

She sat up. Her throat tickled as if something was stuck in it. The light was dim, monochrome patterns of shade sliding across grey-brown surfaces all around. There was a woman with her whose eyes were shrouded by the plastic sweep of a set of ancient data goggles: apart from a spiky coif of black hair, the rest of her was concealed by a white overall that had seen better days. Her hands steadied Oshi's shoulders as she gave in to a spasm of coughing. "Aagh ..."

"Take it easy. Our facilities are limited here -- if you start choking I'll have to perform a tracheotomy." Oshi coughed again, harder -- and something came up. She spat it out disgusted. "Hey, that's better. You feel any better yet? Here, blow into this."

Oshi took the mouthpiece and emptied her lungs into it. She wheezed painfully. "That's good!" said the woman. "You're breathing. Way cool. Can't tell with this fucking 'coder, there's a bug in the homoeobox accelerator, some of us came out with gills instead of lungs ..."

"Gaah." Oshi cleared her throat. "Who are you? Where am I?" Everything settled into place around her. Your next mission, should you choose to accept it --

"I'm Raisa Marikova. According to your tag you are, Oshi Adjani? That right?" She reached up and yanked her goggles down until they hung around her neck, revealing a pair of dark eyes that focussed on Oshi with an almost obsessive intensity.

"I think so." Oshi sat up under her own muscle power, stretched disturbingly dislocated-feeling arms above her. She glanced at the medic, blinking back impressions of dèja vu. The woman had a fine-boned face, skin like parchment but flawless; her body language radiated the raw intensity of the very old or the very naïve. "This is the Ridgegap-47 system?"

"You could call it that." There was something odd about Raisa Marikova's stare -- Oshi strained for recognition, but it eluded her. Bright, dry wit. Oshi blinked, willing her eyes to switch mode, and felt something give; the room flickered into the curious false-green colours that her retinal implants converted ambient EM radiation into. "That's not what we call it, though." Sharp as a knife. "It's called the Duat. Or so we were told when we arrived here."

Oshi came to her feet suddenly, felt her blood pressure drop and blipped her adrenal glands into play -- aren't military bionics wonderful -- and looked round. Green contours of light tracked through every surface, revealing and concealing the secret life that surrounded them. She pursed her lips and whistled, experimentally; in one corner a cobweb flickered lucent blue. Listeners. She blinked her eyes back to optical mode, forcing herself to ignore a wave of nausea: "did my download record say anything about who I am or why I'm here?"

Raisa stepped back hard, up against the grey-finished wall, raised her hands. "What do you think I am, one of the Gods? They don't tell me any of that kind of shit." She stared at Oshi, poking the tip of her tongue out in an exaggerated parody of concentration -- "Ignorance is wisdom. Where did you come from, anyway?"

"I could ask the same of you." Oshi stared at the other woman. Something about her face ... that's it. Raisa was slightly cross-eyed, hence the stare.

"Why is that?"

Oshi cleared her throat. "I was told there wasn't anyone here. As of twenty years ago."

"Twenty years --" Raisa froze. "You came that far," she said quietly. "Why?"

"This system is meant to be awaiting colonization." Oshi coughed again, almost choking on slime. "Squatters --" Another wave of queasiness swept through her. "Shit." She tried to take a step forward, nearly stumbled.

"Hey, calm down! Check yourself in the mirror." Raisa had an arm around her waist before she could double over, her stomach trying to twist like a snake inside her -- "relax -- " one wall was fading to the tunnel-grey of liquid crystals, an active mirror -- "are you feeling sick?"

"Going to -- " A basin appeared in her hands and Oshi doubled over it, stomach heaving. She brought up a thin, bitter mucus that left a metallic taste in her mouth. Be sick. The gravity was light -- two thirds of normal, or less -- but even so Oshi was in difficulties. "Ack." There was a hand at her face, gently rubbing with a towel: she recoiled, shocked to realise that it was a human hand.

"There's no intelligent environment here," Raisa commented under her breath, way too close to Oshi for comfort. " Shit, why do I get to handle the first outsider we get?"

Oshi saw red; angry and humiliated, her defences at an unprofessional low, she pulled back and took a loose swipe at Raisa. And missed -- her reflexes were still annealing, stitching themselves seamlessly into her synapses with the precision that only nanomachinery could achieve. She was as uncoordinated as an eight year-old. "Aagh."

The other woman must have thought she was flailing for balance, falling over. "You need to sit down, you know that?" She wrapped an overly-familiar arm around Oshi's waist again. Oshi leaned on it, staggered round, and caught a glimpse of herself in the active mirror. Gasped.

She was a sight to behold; deathly pale, thin to the point of anorexia, skin still soft from the Gatecoder tank. Her scalp was ringed with an exotic fungal infestation, a gene-tailored mycosis that was now slowly withdrawing from her skull. (For a month it had pumped strange carrier proteins and stranger nucleic acids into her slowly forming cerebrum, softening it up for her personality invasion.) Only now was she really a person, the intricate program of her personality running on the virtual machinery of her brain.

"You've got to take it easy," Raisa told her. "You haven't had time to develop skeletal muscle tone yet; your body's still a bit soft ... " She poked Oshi's ribs with a sharp finger, then gently forced her to sit down again. "Our biomass budget's been hit," she added conversationally: "before long the dog-head will be making us farm the crops by hand."

"Dirt farming?" Dog-head? Oshi was too stunned by her own appearance to follow through. I look like a corpse. Normally when she gated into a system she came out of the resynthesis box at least looking like herself. All systems go, a working body with ready-boosted reflexes and muscles that worked. Not like a skeleton with ringworm. "What's going on --" In my own body, she wanted to say, but the words stuck in her throat like bones.

"Ask Anubis. I'm sure he'll explain everything that's going on in the most amazingly clear way." Oshi couldn't tell whether she was serious or sarcastic. "We're prisoners. We don't have the schematics to build an outbound Dreamtime link, and we don't have the brains to re-invent it. Anubis has one, but he's not talking -- which may not be a bad thing. We're lucky to be alive." Her arms tightened around Oshi's waist like a vice, trapping her from behind -- "When we first arrived -- the pathfinder colony, two hundred of us -- we tried to figure out what's happening. Some of us tried to put up a fight, got zapped for their trouble. See ... " Raisa snapped the fingers of her free hand and Oshi smelled walnuts, something strangely musty as the active mirror flickered into a picture of a different scene -- "this is where we are. Welcome to hell, Oshi Adjani, welcome to the Duat. Chill down and learn to like it ... because if you don't, there's nowhere else to go."

Oshi lay in a different room. The light was dim, signifying night, but the morning heaviness in her arms and the prickling in her eyes told her otherwise. What did she call this place: the Duat? Strange ...

She tried to remember Raisa's face, but it slipped away like a blur of blind-spot retinal damage as if someone had shone a laser in her eyes. She stared at the ceiling, scant centimetres above her nose; raw wooden planks fitted together with the lopsided roughness of human carpentry. The bedding under her felt like a futon, raw cotton in a loose sleeve. There were noises, smells, taste and touch: a faint pulse of mechanical energy beneath the small of her back, hydraulic purge chambers breathing the waste of the machine far below her. It can't be an asteroid. This place must be an oneil. It was not a good omen. The artificial colonies, colossal pressurized cylinders lined with farmland, had a lousy reputation for ecological trouble; exposure to cosmic radiation with only a couple of metres of aluminium for armour didn't make for stable biospheres.

She lay still for a long time, re-learning the feel of her own body. She was still weak from the tank. She recalled how she'd slumped against Raisa's shoulder after her first sight of the Duat. How her knees had turned to jelly. It's not just the gatecoder that's fucked. How it had managed to download her at all, ten percent underweight but with a full complement of viscera and a working neuroendoderm ... it was a miracle of the wrong kind. I should be working, she thought abstractedly.

After a long time, she rolled over on her side. Blinking away black spots from the exertion, she looked around. The room beyond her sleeping niche was small and sparsely furnished: it contained a low table, two rough stools, and a stoneware basin of water. Raisa had brought her here; she'd thought she'd just lie down for a minute to get her breath back, but the minute had stretched. The light came from a naked window recessed into one wall. There was glass in it. Compared to the slums where she had been raised it was a mansion: but by the standards of a culture that bridged the stars and tamed alien worlds it was a hovel.

"Shit."

" That is not a recognised command."

"Huh?" Oshi raised herself to one elbow. "Who -- what's that? Identify yourself."

" This is habitat support, verbal interface only. Welcome to colony unit Ridgegap-47. Today is the fourteenth of Thermidor, local year fifty-seven post-settlement. The time is zero two-forty hours. A familiarisation tutorial is on-line. Voice mail is available. Your medic and orientation tutor is Raisa Marikova. Comrade Marikova is --"

"Hey, what is this shit?" Oshi shook her head, trying to clear it. The dumb computer hook-up droned on, a simple-minded parody of the instant understanding on tap that could be conveyed by a working wisdom network. "Where's Raisa? Where am I?"

"Raisa Marikova has been called to the Temple of the Mysteries of Nephthys. You have been moved from gatecoder medicentre to habitation block D, Memphis, main lifesystem level, Cylinder One."

"Fuck that." Every answer she got raised a hydra's neckful of new questions, but if she stopped to try and get answers now she knew she'd never get moving again. Gingerly feeling her way, Oshi swung her feet out from under the sheet and lowered them to the floor. Dead grass stems crackled underfoot as she stood up; goose-flesh rose on her naked skin. "I'm hungry. What's to eat?" The room pancaked around her for a moment, then settled down.

" There is food in the nearest refectory area. You may proceed. Follow the blue signs." A winking arrow appeared on the door.

"Some clothing -- oh." A loose robe lay folded on one stool. It was a minor struggle to dress herself, but at least the mirror showed that she looked vaguely human. The discoloured patches on her scalp were already hidden beneath a peach-fuzz of hair, and although she was hollow-eyed and hollow-cheeked she didn't quite look like a skeleton. Just very, very hungry. "Show me to the refectory."

The door opened onto a twilit perspective; an alleyway paved in dust ran between anonymous blocks of mud-coloured brick. The light had a curious quality to it, like dusk beneath a cloudless sky. Oshi shuffled at first, until she felt that her sense of balance was up to the job of walking. A blue arrow in her lower-left field of vision pointed the way; as she followed it she tested her wisdom access. Nothing doing ... just a blank echo where there should be a susurration of artificial life all around her, and the moron-level mumbling of the on-line services. So the Duat doesn't have a psychosphere? She tried not to let it faze her, but it was disturbing all the same. That's wrong. Things must be sliding badly ...

The refectory was in a high-walled compound off to one side of the alley. Oshi followed the arrow through a dusty wooden gate, into a low-ceilinged room with a dumb waiter built into one wall and some stools and tables scattered about. The shadows turned everything a murky tint of grey. Oshi sat down. "So what's to eat?" she asked.

"Rice. Eggs. Quorm. Potatoes. Please specify preparation required."

"Oh." She looked down at her hands, so thin and pale that they looked as if they might break off at the wrist if she tried to do anything strenuous. The range of food sounded remarkably limited. But ... "I'll have whatever you can cook which is closest to my metabolic requirements. I need to gain weight and muscle tissue."

"Medical records consulted. Please wait. Your meal will be ready in eight minutes."

Oshi nodded and stare at the backs of her hands. She was remembering: another time when she had been blind, and hungry, and weak. She'd been constantly in pain. Then there was the other time, when she had been strong and fast and could see everything, but still couldn't hold everything at bay -- her first encounter with her own limits, on Miramor. She unconsciously phased her vision down into the infrared spectrum, following the luminous pulse of blood in her arteries and veins. Then she looked up into stranger wavelengths: ultra-violet, dim beneath the efficient lights. The gatecoder had received her entire blueprint and implemented all of it, not just the portions with natural origins. Another mistake; any customs program worth its processor time should have screamed blue murder about my add-ins. All the stuff the Boss dumped on me.What's wrong? Damn, but I can see again. Everything except what's happening.

There was a scraping noise; a chair pulled away from the table across from her. Oshi looked up as Raisa sat down, red-eyed and yawning. "Crazy time to go eating breakfast. Everybody is asleep ... how do you feel?"

Oshi grunted. "Like shit. How do I look?"

Raisa shrugged, pulled a face. She looked tired, her face sagging slightly. "Like you said. Don't worry; the 'coder left biostats in your intestines. You should be able to absorb food very efficiently for the next few days. You'll put on weight like you wouldn't believe, honest."

She stopped talking, sat back and stared at Oshi. Her off-centre expression made Oshi feel unaccountably uneasy, so she focussed on the wall instead; they sat in silence for a while.

"You're the first new arrival in years," said Raisa. "Are you part of the project?" Oshi turned and stared at her. The other woman's fingers tightened on the table edge. Presently, she looked down. "I suppose it's not too much to hope for a straight answer."

"The project. What project?"

"Evacuation." Raisa looked up. "Have you ever been to the Centre worlds? If you're not part of the project, where do you come from?"

Oshi was noncomittal: "I travel. No, I've never seen the Centre."

"It was -- " Raisa stalled in mid-speech and took a deep breath. She looked very disappointed. "We hoped you were part of the second wave."

"We?"

"The others. They're giving you a wide berth, lots of time to adjust. It's been years, you see. We started out as a pathfinder team. Some of us still are, except that we don't know whether -- "

" -- whether there's anyone following you?"

Raisa started. "What!"

Oshi dropped her spoon on the table with a clatter. "I'm not a fool," she said tiredly. "You hoped I'm from your home world, but I'm not. Pathfinders need followers. What was this? A migration? Colony hijacking?"

"We had no idea there was anything out here."

Oshi stared. The other woman looked tired and depressed, the reluctant bearer of news worn ragged with repetition. "Hang on. You beamed out with no destination in mind?"

"Come on. It's not unheard of! Aim at a system and hope there's a gatecoder looking for incoming packets. If you miss, there's the rest of the universe to hope for."

"But that's a suicide bet!"

"And these times are dangerous," Raisa said, a clipped, false brightness in her voice. "If you've never been to the Centre you have no right to judge just how dangerous." Her voice rose: " they were going to destroy our world! Never mind that they already had all the planets outside the water belt around our primary -- they wanted our world too! There was a total Dreamtime lockout. They took it over completely. Anyone who tried to access it fried their brains out. We had to build a gatecoder from library specs and aim it where we thought someone might see the pulse. Don't you see? It was our only hope of survival!"

Oshi picked up her spoon again. "Who was attacking you? Who are these people you call they?"

Raisa stood up: "I was right. You don't know anything. I sent word to Boris, via the network, but they didn't believe me. Nobody told you, or word never got out."

"Word of what?"

"There's a war going on. Did anyone tell you?"

"A war," Oshi frowned. "Tell me about it." Her stomach churned uncomfortably.

"There are monsters in the Dreamtime. Not human; not Superbright either. We can trade with Superbrights, did you know that? At least, we did. But then the others came and ... purged ... them. By the time we realized that something was loose in the Dreamtime within the system it was too late: we'd lost three processor moons and a large proportion of our industrial infrastructure. War broke out, but our strategic systems defected halfway through. We barely had time to put together a pathfinder group and beam out; the rest were due to follow, as many as could make it to the kluged uploader sites for evacuation. Then we found ourselves waking up here. First contact was forty-two years ago, but most of us were stored in download buffers while He decided what to do with us; the damned gatecoder can only handle six bodies at a time. I've been here eight years now, and He said the buffers were empty. So where did you come from?"

She didn't sound very interested, but something in her gaze made Oshi hesitate for a moment before replying. "A place called New Salazar."

Suddenly she had Raisa's complete attention. "Tell me about it!"

Oshi looked at her and saw her naked longing. It made her want to steal the truth and re-work it into something she could present, that Raisa would accept. "A nice planet," she said: "vast forests and blue mountains, oceans that cover almost half its surface. Cities of marble and glass, blended in with the landscape. Civilized and rich and peaceful."

"You're sure none of the pathfinders made it through to your system's gatecoder?" Raisa demanded eagerly. "We broadcast to several systems in this sector --"

"No. I'm quite sure." Oshi shuddered, hoping it was true. The idea opened horrifying vistas, a billion refugees beaming into Year Zero Man's tender mercies.

Raisa turned away. "Shit. If we'd modulated our transmission through a degree or two ..." her shoulders shook. Oshi looked away, spiked by a sudden rush of self-disgust. "Instead, we're here."

"What's wrong with that?"

"You'll find out soon enough," Raisa said from the doorway. Her voice was shaky. "Even if your wisdom and upload feed isn't working. Oh, I should add: there's no Dreamtime backup here. Death is permanent, as far as we can tell. Another irony: try to avoid it. See you tomorrow."

"And you," Oshi murmured, scraping the rim of her bowl. She watched Raisa close the door -- which grated on the stone floor -- and listened to the retreating footsteps with a sense of deja vu. "Damn." Something about Raisa made her feel wistful, brought back memories. She looked down into the bowl, trying to make sense of her mixed feelings. You know nothing. Yes, but how am I going to adjust? What had happened on the station in orbit about New Salazar was bad enough that if she stopped to think about it she could work herself into a screaming fit: but this was worse in a way. Totally disorientating.

Oshi sat back. "What did I expect?" she asked the air. It seemed like a good question to start with. Vague visions of meeting the Superbright who ran the colony mission danced through her head; another creature of the same species as the Boss, she supposed. But this -- a war evacuation -- she'd never heard of such a thing before. An evacuation from a rich world too, not a dirt-poor backwater farmed by cynical Superbrights, but a puissant and sophisticated Centreworld! "What is the universe coming to?" she whispered. "Shit."

Her bowl was empty, her belly was full, and her body was telling her it was time to sleep. Oshi stood up and pushed her chair back. Absent mindedly, she realised that she was still holding her spoon. I think tomorrow I will obtain some answers, she resolved. As she turned to leave she put the spoon down. It clattered oddly when it touched the table: she glanced back and saw it lying next to her bowl, the stem bent at right-angles where she had gripped it.

Slowly, a smile spread across her face. Yes, I think I will obtain some answers tomorrow ...

Dawn throughout the entire colony was postponed for an hour while the Goon Squad tracked down the new arrival. Word had gone out: Anubis, the dog-head, wanted to see her. Nobody tried to warn Oshi; the presence of the Good Squad was an automatic curfew that nobody in their right mind would dare to break. So she was still asleep when they broke down her door and jabbed their guns in her face.

Jolted awake by a presence leaning over her, Oshi opened her eyes and began to shove the sheet down -- then froze in mid-gesture. Sudden terror leered down at her. The Squaddie waved the muzzle of its gun around: "you to get dressed!" it crowed, rearing up on its hindmost six legs. " Il Duce see you!"

What the fuck ... gut-deep coldsweat fear swept up her spine. Her eyeballs flicked to infrared, EM, other spectra in a blur of raw information, taking in too many eyes, limbs, tentacles, something like a small cannon pointing at her face and a hole where the door had been, an acrid gunpowder smell in her nostrils --

" You to get dressed!" repeated the monster, backing up a few centimetres. " The Man see you!" An angry chitter echoed from the corridor behind it.

Confused and scared, Oshi scrambled back into the farmost corner of the room, jammed up against the wall. Her head felt like fog, decaying, acrid -- or was that the smell of the thing in the doorway --

The thing was pointing a gun at her. It would probably be a good idea to do as it said.

"Just a, a moment --" she began.

" DER FUEHRER!" shrieked the thing in the doorway. "Wants to see you," it added conversationally.

Oshi blinked. Some kind of living terror weapon, every instinctive fear of insect/reptile/predator rolled into one bad dream ... "I'm coming," she said. She forced herself to uncurl and reach out across the bed for the robe she'd worn last night; it took more self-control than she'd imagined. The edgy, jittery terror of being unarmed and of having a gun pointed at her -- she was used to that. But those biting jaws, those clutching fingers ... I'm still alive, she told herself. So there must be a reason . ..

The Squaddie backed up into what was left of the doorway while she clothed herself. It gripped the smoking support posts with two pairs of scaly hands, pointing the cannon at her with a third pair. The black bundle of gun barrels tracked her of its own accord, tiny red eyes swivelling voyeuristically across her body. Oshi shuddered, wiped a hand across her brow. Her pulse pounded in her ears, her skin was slick -- behind the Squaddie, everything was dark. " Ayatollah see you!" it cawed, backing into the alley. "Hss-ss-s ..."

Smoke and darkness, mist and night. Oshi edged forwards. Trembling -- hungry -- muscles not responding properly although she was in far better control of her body this morning -- she looked round. "I can't see," she complained, blinking her vision to IR in time to see the Goon Squad arrayed along the alley in all their gory splendour.

The sight was too much. Oshi backed up hard. A tentacle lashed forward, whipped around her ankles; another caught her around the shoulders, pinioning her. Pressure blurred everything for an instant, then she felt the touch of many hands ... "You go to see Anubis," it gibbered in her ear as she was rotated, feet over head, smelled something hideously familiar from the scaly hide that rippled and stretched against her. She fought back against a hot urge to vomit; if they were going to kill me they didn't need to put on this show ... there was a jolt, then a bump that rippled through her spine. Then they were moving. Going to see the dog-headed god.

There followed a jouncing ride through acrid-smelling darkness, clutched too tight to breathe in the scaly tentacles/claws/fingers of a living weapon with bad breath. Her neck felt far too light -- my head, where's my head? -- Oshi deliberately caught her tongue between two molars. The pain worked; subtly modified neural paths cut in, shifting her senses into three-dimensional acuity until she could identify each individual light receptor in her eyes, could taste through her fingertips the scaly hide of the Goon bearing her through the winding alleys of the town. She sensed the other Squaddies behind and in front, blocky guns angled to cover the sealed entrances of buildings occupied or otherwise. The Goons were living weapons built for fighting in built-up areas -- not very intelligent, certainly not as efficient as cyberweapons, but loyal and dependable and viciously fast.

Oshi forced herself to relax, remembered a calming mantra, willed herself into control of glands and limbs and senses. She let her face slip into neutral, trying to give nothing away. Maybe I can escape later she thought. Difficult but not impossible to fake a citizen wisdom interface as well as skin, visual recognition ... something slid into place in her head, some tiny component of glacial stillness, and she was back in charge again. Should escape for however long it takes to link up with the resistance and get their side of the story. Whoever they are. She could sense their presence; the existence of the Goon Squad implied some kind of armed threat to the status quo.

A sudden gust of cold air told her they were outside the built up area before her captor jinked sideways in a curious flowing motion, bouncing through a gateway on many-jointed legs. The grass glowed pale red with the heat from below: small creatures froze or dived for cover as the Goon Squad sprinted past. There were trees to either side, modified mangroves and the soil support plants that kept the environment ticking over. Dusty brown soil and stones jumbled underfoot as the Squad pounded uphill. There was something ahead: Oshi tensed even before her captors began to slow.

Flip -- she was upright, still clenched breathlessly tight in appendages. Her abductor raised her towards it's face. She couldn't help it: she flinched, cringed, tried to pull her head back from the monster.

" Ill Duce see you NOW!" it screeched at her, drool spraying from its mandibles. The end-wall of the colony bulked vast and faceless behind it, a slab of metal stretching vertically into the sky. It glowed a dim orange to her infra-red sight. A door appeared in the wall, needles of darkness growing outwards with silent speed, fracturing into chilly night. The Squaddie whirled backwards in a storm of bony legs, yanking her with it into the darkness beyond. A rill of static clamped down on all her senses, flaying perceptions into fragments of knife-edged pain and fear. Her body seemed to do a fast dissolve from the inside out, coring her as cleanly as a drill: her last thought before it happened was the walls, they're full of bones

Peace.

Oshi awakened. She tried to open her eyes, winced at the stab of pain that sparkled through her skull. She tried again, one eye then the other. She was lying on her back, looking up at a curved ceiling painted with miniature fields and groves of tiny trees. The wall beside her was bare steel, streaked orange with rust; it met the ceiling in an arch high above. A huge grey lump of stone protruded from it, bisecting her view of the ceiling. A tiny wisp of haze drifted across the roof above it.

She turned her head. The floor she was lying on dropped away beside her. Sudden vertigo: her head swam as she looked up and saw, not a painted ceiling, but the real fields that lined the other side of the colony cylinder, many kilometres overhead.

Oshi sat up, slightly nauseous in the low gravity of the near-hub region. About point one of a gee, she estimated. Where have they gone? Things came clear; she was on a narrow ledge on the end-wall of the colony, about a fifth of the way down from the hub. There was no sign of her abductors. The ledge was about ten metres long; at one end of it there was a door, and at the other end an entrance of a different kind --

No. I am not going to go in there. Not again. The aversion she felt was terrifyingly strong.

She rose to her feet unsteadily. "What --" she began. The world pancaked around her shoulders. "Is -- " She looked round. "happening?"

The door opened, creaking. Steps worn smooth with age led up in an improbable sweep of gothic lunacy to a parlour beneath a high-arched ceiling. Now she could see inside it, she realised that it led up and out into the huge grey structure that jutted out of the end wall of the colony. Huge windows leaned outwards at an improbable angle, canted across the axial abyss. A small inorganic drone shaped like a skittle waited in the centre of the room.

"Oshi Adjani. God will see you now."

"God -- " she stared at the drone. "What are you talking about?"

"God," it repeated with the patience of a stone. "Will see you now."

Oshi shuddered, gulped back a cry of laughter or pain, blinked and looked around. God. Il Duce. Der Fuehrer. Right. Hot dawn light streamed in through the oval windows, staining the walls with liquid fire. Behind her, the lift shaft that opened onto the ledge belched softly. She seemed to hear the echoing cries of lunacy born upwards on the waft of circulatory gases: Il Duce ... Oshi swallowed . "Take me to him."

This Superbright is either a practical joker or a lunatic. Or both. Why did I ever say yes to this? Her ribs still ached from the terror-ride. As she climbed the steps, the drone retreated before her, legs clicking softly on the stone floor. At the top, she turned and looked back down the ledge: gulped and looked away quickly. The sight of the gigantic throat opening onto a stone platform made her feel queasy.

The drone retreated up a twilit corridor, painted in faded ochre heiroglyphics: intricate pictures of sloe-eyed men and women and animal-headed aliens competed for space with less familiar representations. Black and grey tiles danced a subliminal symmetry before her eyes. One glance out of the windows had told her everything she needed to know, coupled with the reduced gravity. The redoubt was slung just below the axis, defended by a cliff-face kilometres high: it merged at the top with the axial tube that ran from the interior of the colony cylinder out into whatever space-based factories kept the system running. The sky outside was the deep blue of dawn, but such light as there was would not reach far inside this structure. Someone -- whoever lived here -- had no liking for daylight.

The drone paused at the end of the corridor, waiting for her to catch up, then moved off again -- through doors and hallways more numerous than she could see any cause for -- emerging finally into a dim room with a high-vaulted ceiling and a few items of inanimate furniture. What light there was came from a trio of dull globes suspended from the ceiling; the shadows were long and dark. There was a curtained archway at the far side of the room, set between two oddly-shaped pillars. "God will see you now," it repeated, backing towards a low niche. "Proceed ..."

Oshi reached out and grabbed at a tabletop. Her aim was accurate: the alabaster dish shattered when it struck the drone, shards of stone splintering in all directions with the slow spread of a low-gee explosion. " Squeee -- " The drone fell over, all six legs beating helplessly at the air.

" Proceed!" she sneered, trying to conceal her fear. "I'll proceed when I feel like it, you lump of shit and plastic."

She pushed through the curtains, and paused. She stood at one end of a twilit hall of columns, marble capped in lotus-blossom scrollwork supporting low beams of stone, wrought in carvings of incredible intricacy and antiquity. Cressets set into bronze brackets on the columns cast a fitful glow across the room. The floor was inlaid with mosaics, the design of which were vaguely familiar to her: designs that she felt she had seen somewhere before. The side walls of the hall were shrouded by darkness and pillars, unlit and unseen. The door-frame at the far end of the hall arched overhead in a sweep of polished stone, converging in a parabola. A brass balance hung from it, pans wide enough to weigh an adult human swinging slowly in the air. To either side of the balance, a throne of granite stood upon a dais. The left-hand one was empty: but seated in the right --

The thing on the throne lolled sideways, black tongue hanging from between its narrow jaws. It had the body of a man from the neck down, but its skin was black: not merely pigmented, but a deep, iridescent darkness like the carapace of a beetle. From the neck up, it was utterly inhuman, a wild-dog fantasy grafted onto human anatomy.

"Oh shit," said Oshi.

"Welcome to the Duat, Dead ka." The occupant of the throne grinned like a hound. "Be at home in my domain. Come hither; approach the throne of Anubis." His voice grated like a saw blade dragged across sheet steel.

Oshi took a step forward on legs like jelly: "what is going on?"

Something moved, off to one side. A sideways glance showed her something she wished she hadn't seen, hanging between two of the pillars. Its mouth gaped wide in a silent rictus of agony: judging by the gaping wound in the owner's chest he had died before -- whatever -- had hung him out to dry.

"These are the western lands, the domain that lies beyond the cavern of the setting sun, guarded by the sphinx Aker. I am Anubis, the weigher of souls. I bid you welcome, for I am your destiny and your judge. We must speak. There is much that you should be aware of."

"You're -- what?" Another dried-out corpse hung between pillars to her right. Oshi focussed on the throne, zooming her eyeballs through a full-spectrum scan. Near panic added a jittery tension to her stance: she felt simultaneously present and absent, as if she was at full readiness but someone else was driving her body. "Do you know what I am?" Nameless fears hung in the balance of her mind as she took another step. Anubis was a huge presence looming above her. The stink of his breath pulsed in a hot miasma, driven towards her on a breeze from behind the thrones. Now she was close she saw what the weighing pans held; in one, a long white feather, and in the other, some dried-out red offal.

"Yes. I know what you are," said the dog-head. It yawned, baring canines the size of knives. Lucent black pupils the size of hand grenades focussed in on her, outlined by a tiny rind of sclera. Saliva dribbled from one side of its grin. "You are a dead soul, despatched to me that I might weigh you in the balance! But come, we have much to discuss first. You are unlike the others in my domain. How do you explain this?"

Oshi paused just beyond arm's reach: "you're a Superbright download," she stated. "Your purpose is to supervise the robot installations in this system. What's going on? Why haven't you reported recently?"

Anubis grinned and slavered, panting like a dog. "I know nothing of this super-bright you speak of," he grated. "I am Anubis and this is the Duat. I await only the coming of the Great One, blessed be he, who approaches from the distance: I fulfill my duties in the meantime. Indeed, it is to his presence that you owe your incarnation: were he not shortly to arrive, I would have left you in limbo a little longer. Who are you to demand anything of me?"

"But the --" Oshi stopped. Thinking: no wisdom. That means no Dreamtime upload if I die. But why? Suppose something's soaking up all the bandwidth available to the colony. Something like a Superbright-- "I have a message for you," she said. "A message from the Boss."

Anubis yawned. His jaws snapped shut with a clack and he leaned forward, ears swivelling to focus on Oshi. "It is of no importance. This is my domain, and within it I reign supreme. I discharge my holy duties, and none will divert me from them. Will you be judged now, errant soul, or will you maintain this pretense of life indefinitely?"

Oshi stared. He's stark raving mad! Now what do I do? "If it's all very well --" she eyed the balance warily -- "I'd rather carry on pretending to be alive."

"Come now. My judgements are nothing if not fair."

"I wouldn't presume upon your mercy," she muttered. "What is in the balance?"

"Your soul." Anubis raised one hand: the balance swung wildly, the pan containing the feather rising. "Your ba. If it outweighs the feather of the law --"

Oshi stared at the offal in the lower pan with queasy fascination.

" -- you will be found guilty. But if you are innocent --"

"No," said Oshi, her voice husky with emotion. "No!" I didn't come all this way to have my heart ripped out by a mad Superbright!

"I urge you to reconsider," hissed the dog-head. "If you are innocent you will join me here, in the redoubt. I can show you things --" The floor below her turned to glass. She was looking down on herself, as she had been -- hairless and emaciated, skin soiled from a ride through the midnight forest, lying on a rough stone floor somewhere. The window misted back into stone before she could see any more of her circumstances. "I can expose the truth that lies within you. I am the only God of these western lands. If you do not choose to follow me, all other ways are sterile."

Oshi backed away from the throne. Contorted shapes tugged at her peripheral vision; mummified bodies racked and hung between the pillars to either side, their chests hanging open and empty where once their hearts had been. Doors bulked in the shadows behind them. "Let me go," she mumbled. Somewhere deep inside, she winced at the tremor in her voice. "This is nothing to do with me."

"Oh, but it is," snarled Anubis, lurching to his feet. "Respect!" he barked, eyes suddenly wide and furious: "Anubis demands Respect!" There was a rattling and hissing from behind the curtained entrance. "Respect for his Dignity and Moral Primacy! The agencies of false gods hold no sway here! They sent Anubis here to rot so they can go and rot too, for all the good that this will do them! Respect, I say!"

Oshi stared. Cold sweat trickled across her forehead, matting her eyebrows together. "I see. Of course. Is that your final word?"

Anubis became abruptly calm, as if posessed by a different personality. "Yes, Anubis believes it is," he said, scratching behind one long ear with a humanoid hand. "Respect! Damn all false gods!"

"But there's a war situation; Ultrabrights are attacking --"

"There is no war!" He clapped his hands. "Leave me now. Must think. Guards!" The curtain behind her creaked open a fraction: there was an angry hissing from behind it. "Don't even dream about subversion. Won't tolerate it! The Duat is all mine. Mine! Won't let the other gods spoil it! Won't let the dead souls spoil it! Won't ever let them go! Now leave me!"

Oshi glanced over her shoulder at the vestibule; oh shit. The Goon waiting there had spotted her. Blind terror gave her wings as she leapt to one side, past an eviscerated woman who had withered into a leathery mass gripped between chains: she yanked the door open and shut behind her, fumbled blindly with the cast-iron bolt, then turned and tensed. Something snapped insider her and she ran into the guts of the castle, sobbing for breath, cold terror coursing through her veins.

Minutes passed before sanity brought her stumbling to a halt in a corridor of hewn stone blocks, floored in fused sandstone. The sole illumination was a glow-lamp recessed in the ceiling: it cast shadows as sharp as a knife blade behind her. Where she was was a mystery. Her sense of direction, normally as acute as any navigation system, had deserted her completely somewhere in the maze of the redoubt. An acrid scent tickled her nostrils. She had only smelt it once before, but it was enough to make her shudder.

Those monsters. He must breed them up somewhere. She shivered at the thought. He's cracked. How in hell do I report back now? Is there some other power base I can focus on?

She began to pace along the corridor, reflexes alert for signs of danger as she turned the problem around in her mind. Item: Anubis is stone crazy. Why? He's on his own. If what Year Zero Man said was halfway true, that would fit. No stimulation. A human being in sense-dep for three days shows signs of distress; total isolation for much longer than that produces psychotic effects, hallucinations. How much worse could it be for a being with a thousand times the information-processing bandwidth of a human mind?

Someone, somewhere, must know ... Oshi blinked. A tickle on the back of her neck, where there were no hairs to be disturbed. There was high-density Wisdom traffic nearby. Flick ... her sub-cortical modifications came on-line, sucking in the signal greedily. Not enough process-power to figure out what was going through, but enough to know that it was heavy. Anubis, perhaps. Oshi could feel it, sense the two-way traffic as subtle signals pulsed back and forth. Something is very wrong. It isn't just Anubis' psychosis. Even paranoids have enemies. I wonder why Anubis needs guards?

There was a doorway set back in the corridor wall. Corridors made Oshi nervous. Like a burglar exploring at midnight she sought shelter, somewhere to hide. It looked promising. She bent to listen, heard nothing. When she turned the handle and pushed, the door creaked like a breaking neck. She avoided the poisoned spike and the other trap with ease: they had not been placed well, or the designers had not anticipated that they might be encountered by someone who could see in the dark. The room she found on the other side of the hidden trapdoor was completely dark, shrouded with a carpet of dust. Oshi glanced round, jacking her eyes down into infrared. Boxes and ... no, coffins. Oddly shaped sarcophagi, stacked carelessly like traveller's chests in the hold of a tramp ship. She shivered. A tomb, perhaps, more furniture tailored to Anubis' intricate web of self-delusion. But there were other furnishings here, too. Intricate columns of hieroglyphic script marched down the walls behind the boxes; a table hulked in the deep shadows, laden with tableware: and behind it, there was a bundle of what looked like ...

She walked over to the far wall and reached out, grabbed cold metal. She felt a sudden rush of savage joy at the comfortable weight of wood and iron in her hands. Now we'll see who's in charge, she decided, carefully avoiding the icy knowledge that if Anubis retained so much as a shred of his Superbright identity she stood as much chance of resisting him as a snail before a juggernaut.

Armed with the short halberd, Oshi felt more confident about trying the corridor. She glanced either way before she stepped out; then darted along from doorway to doorway, ducking for cover, professionally paranoid. Escape from this lunatic's dream of a dungeon was her first priority, she decided. But I need to find out what the fuck he's doing at the wisdom level. Why he's taken it down, dropped the Dreamtime connection too -- which is just the long-range counterpart of the wisdom link.What does he think he's doing, cutting himself off? Surely there must be some method to his madness? Two doorways ahead, to either side, there was a dark stretch: the glow-bulb burned out. Oshi ducked forward, jumping from cover to cover.

Her only warning was a twitch of air against the nape of her neck. Oshi fell back against the left-hand wall, spun round with the heavy butt of the halberd braced against stone. A nightmare presence bore down on her, six arms stretched wide, mandibles rippling in concentric circles --

"YEEE!"

The Goon lunged forward, skidding, unable to stop. Oshi leaned into the shaft. A sickening thud jarred her to the core, sprayed hot dark blood across her face as she twisted, ducked to avoid a lashing fistful of claws. "Yeee --" The screech trailed off into a bubbly rasp as the Goon shuddered, movements slowing, and tried to tear itself away. Half-blinded by a foam of blood and sweat, Oshi dragged at the halberd, twisting as it sucked out of the wounded monster: lift and chop forwards and down, feel the thud of the axe-blade lodge in something like flesh and bone. Can't see. Where -- down on the floor. Chop. Hot liquid gouted across her legs. "Lie down and die, dammit!" She shivered, aching to the core: muscles screamed at her to stop. Is it alone? She froze, listening. Later she'd swear that she heard the Goon's six-chambered heart falter into silence.

Nothing else moved in the corridor. She breathed in raggedly, looking down through a clear hole in her visual field: everything else was a solid red-out, obscured by the blood in her eyes. The living weapon lay at her feet, leaking gore and shit and a loop of twisted intestines from a messy hole in its abdomen. Its huge and complex head lay at her feet, outer jaws half-severed from its face. The creature had a sex: it was male, a pair of incongruously small penises spilling from a ventral pouch unsealed by death. Suddenly the halberd was unbearably heavy. Oshi grounded its point, heedless of the risk of damage, leaned against the wall and smeared at her face with a muck-splashed sleeve. Screwing up her face she forced herself to weep for a moment: the tears helped clear the ooze from her eyes. Vision returned, blurry and pink-stained at first. "Lucky," she whispered, staring at the claws that grasped, the teeth that ground. "So lucky." A shudder racked her, from the base of her spine to the nape of her neck: for a moment she felt unbearably horny, dizzy with the eroticism of survival. "I'm so lucky ..."

Something scratched behind her. Reflexes made her whirl: weak muscles made her stagger and stumble. The door on the right. She stared at it. It looked like something that belonged in a dungeon: thick wood bound in black iron, secured -- ominously, in the corridor -- by bolts evidently designed to withstand an assault from the other side. Silence. Then, after a moment: scrit scrit scrit.

"Shit." Not so lucky any more. Forcing herself to lift her feet and glide like a vampire, Oshi crossed over to the door and leaned against it. Total silence, total attention focussed on it. All her senses kicked in: infra-red, touch, wisdom access --

There was someone behind the door. Someone with the standard upload nanomonitors, and something else she didn't recognize. It certainly wasn't a Goon; not Anubis, either. And the door locked on the outside.

Oshi didn't stop to think. " Hey." It was a short-range call over the wisdom link, an electronic yell that would only be audible to the person on the other side of the door: " who are you?"

" Help me. Let me out of here. Please!"

She reached out and grabbed the halberd one-handed. She worked on the bolts with her free hand: as the second one slid back, she caught up her weapon and levelled it, point first, dropping to a crouch as the door swung inwards. The point wove in tiny circles before her eyes; she was still jittery with adrenalin. She slowly relaxed as she saw that there was no immediate threat. "Shit. What have they done to you?"

A short man, brown-skinned and bald, lay spread-eagled on a metal table. His arms and legs were pinned out by restraining straps like a rat awaiting dissection. The fingers of one hand were dark with blood where he'd been scraping them on the table's edge. Oshi took it all in: the stone walls and ceiling like something out of a dark age, robosurgeon hovering over the top of the table, cannulae winding into the veins of his neck like the roots of a revoltingly hungry plant. He rolled his eyes at her: " I can't speak. There's a block on my larynx. Please help --"

"Anubis's dirty little secret." She crossed over to him, leaned close to his face. As he saw what she was carrying, what was smeared all over her, his hopeful expression faded somewhat. "Spinal shunt, huh? You must be the resistance."

" Who are you? Not one of us --"

Oshi poked at the robosurgeon: it blipped irritably. "Hah. He wants you alive. I should have guessed." She glanced round at the door, then back to the 'surgeon. "Hang on a moment." She closed her eyes and waited for her embedded systems to get a handle on the medical device's idiot instructional interface. Security was minimal: it hadn't been built to cope with the Boss's thinkware crackers. One moment's thought and it began to whir and click: silvery filaments began to reel out through the cannulae, retracting from the prisoner's neck. "What should I call you?"

" Boris."

It rang a bell. "What are you doing here?" She watched the robosurgeon carefully disengage from his hijacked spinal ganglia: to her wisdom senses it looked as if the machine was slurping a green haze of reflex activity up the tubes into its squat, polyhedral body.

" Anubis likes me to stick around." No sense of irony evident. " Thinks if he holds me for long enough he'll bore me into telling him what I was doing with three general-purpose assemblers in the axial robot farms."

"And you won't?" she asked rhetorically. The emerald sheen was almost gone from his legs: she walked round the bench and began working clumsily on the restraining straps. She winced at a stabbing pain in her ribs, where the Goons had grabbed her. "How civilized. He doesn't appear to have tortured you. Much."

" It wouldn't get him anywhere. My pain centre's shut down. So's my amygdala. You'll have to give me a minute or two before I can emote enough to communicate effectively. Right now I'm in zombi mode. "

"Huh." His feet flopped free, twitching slightly. "Felt that?"

"Aah-uh." She glanced up; he was vocalizing again.

"Can you walk?"

He rolled his eyes. The tubes began to retract from his neck, sealing the entry points behind them. Oshi finished with his feet and began to unstrap his arms. "What a mess. Did you tell him anything?"

"Nuh-uh."

"That's good. Do you know who I am?"

" New arrival. Raisa told. Before. They took me last night. Yes?"

"Ack." She picked up his left wrist; it was completely limp, flopping back when she let go of it. "Look, you're something in the ... opposition, no? I'm here because this entire system dropped off the net a while ago. We're going to be attacked by an Ultrabright agency sometime soon, and it's essential that someone sane is running things. I don't know how long we've got; communications throughout the sector are shot to pieces. So we may have only days to organize a system in-depth defense, or we may have years: got that? So tell me, what are you going to do?"

Boris blinked, blearily, looking up at her: "faint," he said.

His eyes began to roll up in their sockets. "Damn it." Oshi grabbed his hair as he fell forward over the table. "You can't fucking do this to me! How am I meant to get out of here?"

"Eurgh."

"Shit!" She glanced round, then leaned the halberd against the table and began to roll Boris over on his side. He was short -- shorter than Oshi -- and not so heavy in the low gee field: but, she ached everywhere and felt unbelievably puny and skinny. Kneeling down, she pulled him over the edge of the table and forced herself to stand, taking his weight across her shoulders. Dark spots swam across her eyes: maybe I should leave --

She was standing. Boris wasn't heavy: she was just weak, skeletal musculature under par from the cloning tank. It was a strain to move. Oshi slid a foot forward, then another. Somehow she got her hand around the slippery-slick head of the halberd, just behind the hook-and-blade; using it as a staff made it easier to shuffle along. For a moment she hesitated: willing to do anything to get out of this madhouse, even to the extent of ditching a fellow-inmate. But that would be -- no. If he's part of some kind of resistance I need him. Got to get his friends behind me and set the tide turning. Organize a defense in depth fuckwads won't work for me so I'll get a new bunch in charge and let them do it. Ow! My back is never going to be the same again. Which way is home?

Laboriously, painfully, Oshi crept out into the corridor. Ignoring the corpse of the Goon, she trudged towards the darkened stretch of passage. Something rang a bell within her, rewinding her sense of direction: sometime soon --

Disorientated though she was, her backbrain navigator kept her on course for the vestibule. There was a doorway at the end of the passage: she staggered down the steps to the ledge -- so friendly and normal in contrast -- waiting for her. There were no Goons, no robots. Boris was a dead weight on her back, a hammer nailing white-hot agony down her spine. She slumped forwards, rolling him over her shoulders, then straightened up. Pausing a moment to gasp for air, she managed a frightened glance out at the cloud-streaked blue sky that twisted endlessly around on itself. Anubis, she repeated to herself with the frantic circularity of the obsessed, don't take me on the way down. Anubis. She leaned across Boris's prostrate body, feeling for a pulse: the halberd clattered to the floor behind her. What have you done to this man? Why? What has he done --

Oshi somehow dragged Boris after her, through the uncannily-human throat at the far end of the ledge, onto the gridded floor within. She looked down: below the gridded floor was a tunnel, an endless tube of yellow cartilaginous plaques, hot red veins and living flesh framing the mechanics of escalation. She was perched on a frail metal tray, about to be lowered down a gargantuan oesphagus.

The lift began to sink, bearing them gently out towards the floor of the cylinder. Oshi collapsed on the floor and lay face-up, drawing in ragged gasps of air. All she could see was the nightmare in her mind's eye when the Keeper of the Dead had summoned her. Please don't ... I can't take it twice in one morning.

It was a long ride down to ground level. As they neared the bottom of the shaft, Oshi retreated to the furthermost recess of the lift and picked up her halberd. She looked round edgily, searching the inside of the funicular room for any kind of sign as to what had happened to her. She saw old stone blocks encrusted with some kind of lichen. The lift must be centuries old, maintained by biomorphic systems while its silicaceous foundations rotted. There were no bones; whatever she'd seen on the way in had been an artefact of the twilight. Light streamed in through the open door, making her blink. It was her first sight of the colony by daylight. Reflexive agoraphobia took over: this can't be an artificial base ... it's too big!

Boris groaned. Oshi turned and pulled him up, leaned him against the wall of the lift, and dragged one of his arms over her shoulder. He wasn't quite so much of a dead weight. "Can you walk?" she asked.

" No. Just." Still communicating via wisdom implants; a bad sign.

"You are in a bad way. Where do we want to go?"

" Out. Memphis, the settlement block. Avoid open space. Goons --" he sagged against her in a dead faint.

"That's cool." She glanced round, then looked up at a sky contoured with forests and valleys, shrouded by wispy cirrus clouds. She staggered, leaned on her weapon: "... shit, you're a mess." I don't normally speak to myself, she thought: "do I?" Her pulse sounded like erratic thunder, her throat ached, and the world was revolving above her head. The pain in her ribs from where the Goon had grabbed her was intensifying, but so was the urge to laugh -- a mad, idiot giggle that wouldn't go away if she ever let it get past her tongue. "This can't be real. I mean, it can't be ..."

" It is." Startled, Oshi glanced round. Boris: eyes open, regarding her with guarded interest. He looked a mess; as if someone had sucked the juices out of him, starting a process of mummification from the inside out. Only his eyes looked alive. " We've got to move. Goons will be out searching soon. Weapons aren't grown yet -- we can't fight them off long enough to put one over Anubis. That's why Anubis had me ... see?"

"That's it. I've had enough. Let's go. Get to your friends." Even as she said it she harboured no great hope that they would manage it; just a dull, depressing fear that fate would overtake them on a silent breeze of too many tentacles and mandibles and many-jointed fingers. At the back of her mind there was a nameless fear; that she was hallucinating, that it was all still a dream that she could see through, and that at the last he would step through the curtains of reality, take her right back to her hot-dark childhood of pain. The Boss, somehow conflated with her uncle: the hated power-figure. Sometimes it had helped her in the past to imagine that she was talking to a friend, an advocate who could tell her the truth about her situation with wisdom and compassion. But this time she couldn't quite bridge the gap, couldn't make herself answer her own questions or cover her own loss of faith. Nobody answered her; or the answers she found were so uncomfortable she wished she hadn't asked.

Gravel rolled away beneath her foot. She stood up slowly, leaning into Boris's weight, rubbed a fist against one rib that jagged a needle of pain through her. Got to get out of here ...

"Let's move."

Shuffling, Oshi started down-hill. Boris tried to walk, staggered drunkenly against her so that it was almost more trouble to keep him upright than to carry him. It was easy to ignore the looming sky when she reached the tree line; boojums stretched their hairy bifurcations overhead, blocking the light back to a turgid twilight. Small maintenance creatures twittered and scuttled in the undergrowth, following their passage with wary eyes. Everything in the forest had a purpose, however obscure -- these biospheres were the outcome of a thousand years of research, the dynamics of nature nailed down by a sharp technology. Insects rasped and chirred in the grass. It was hot, growing hotter with the day. Oshi was sweating almost before they started, eyes cast down to follow the red earth trail down from the funicular to what she hoped would be a semblance of civilisation.

A creeper brushed her face; she dodged it, slowed. Let Boris stop. " Here." She leaned him against a tree trunk; he didn't fall over, now. " I'm slowing you. Go on, get away. Leave me."

She stared at him. "You're crazy, you know that?"

He smiled feebly. "Ack." A faint whisper from his voice. " Walk soon."

Oshi nodded, suddenly feeling ashamed of herself. Her throat and ribs still ached, but that wasn't critical. I don't know enough. Who else could I --

She sat down. "No," she said. "I'm not going to leave you."

"Aah." He closed his eyes for a moment; she thought he was about to faint, then understood it for the anger that it signified.

"I have questions."

" Damn your questions. Why did you rescue me?"

"It seemed like a good idea at the time. I was improvising." Oshi glanced round, ignoring her aches and pains, taking the opportunity to breathe deeply and scan the undergrowth for trackers. A myriad of upload links pulsed digital call-signs between each other, but their signature tune was empty; the dreamtime support network existed, but there were no destination signals, no entrypoints into the wisdom or afterife net. "This was not what I was expecting when I came here. I want answers."

"Oh. I suppose you deserve some, then. As soon as I have the breath for it. Anubis can be quite -- insistent -- with his hospitality."

"So I gather." A long stem of grass sprouted near Oshi's feet. She plucked it, delicately nibbled on the end and rotated it between her teeth. "You were part of a pathfinder expedition?"

"I thought you were one of us." He seemed surprised.

"Raisa was unclear on the concept," Oshi said absently. "You were a pathfinder team sent out in a desperate emergency, to prepare the way for a big migration. Refugees from the imperialism of an alien power, no?"

" They unleashed berserkers; self-replicating destroyers targetted on our worlds. The expansion processors were not enough for them: they wanted everything. No negotiations: just a flat ultimatum to get out.We hoped there would be a gatecoder terminal somewhere in our path ..."

"There was. Why are there so few of you?"

Without warning, Boris slumped down against the tree trunk. Oshi spun round then paused. Tears trailed lucent slug-tracks across his sunken cheeks. Despite herself, Oshi felt the breath catch in her throat.

"I see."

"You don't. We knew what the probabilities were; it was a risk. But there should have been something. The enemy must have disrupted Heimat completely, placed the planet in orbit around its own centre of gravity. Nothing less would have ... the silence. Unless it was Anubis. Unless he knows where the eight hundred million have gone."

"There is no Dreamtime access in this colony." Oshi rolled the grass stem between her fingers. "Do you suppose Anubis shut it down deliberately -- to stop anything following you?"

"But you --"

"I came from the other direction, from the frontier heading inwards. Please, consider that Anubis, while quite mad, need not be stupid. At least, not back then; I can't say what degenerative processes a Superbright can undergo, but under the circumstances it would make sense for him to sever his Dreamtime links to the Centre, and to shut down his links to all other destinations. Playing dead, in other words, as a defensive strategy."

Oshi stopped, and contemplated the devastated shred of grass. "Of course, that may be what drove Anubis over the edge. Terror induced isolation can bring its own nightmares ..."

"It's plausible; as good an explanation as anything else. Whatever, it doesn't change our situation. We are prisoners. Anubis will not let us leave, will not give us access to the Dreamtime for wisdom, afterlife, or any other reason, and grows stranger and crazier by the year. What were you saying? Why you came here?"

"I'm a messenger. But I think my message just self-aborted ..."

"Some messenger." He opened his eyes again, turned his head slightly towards her. His voice was hoarse and stale from lack of use, but real: he'd dropped the direct-brain-contact. " Messengers don't kill squaddies with pointed sticks."

"And you were not imprisoned in Anubis' dungeon for nothing, my friend. Tell me: what is going on here?"

Boris twitched, spasmodically: trying to sit up. Oshi moved to help him, but he shook her away irritably. "I'll do it on my own." He shuffled back against the tree and she noted that his legs and arms were terribly thin. "I don't want to tell you everything, for two reasons. Firstly, you have given me no proof that you do not belong to Anubis. He isn't normally this subtle, but we can't afford to take risks, as you will understand. Secondly, if Anubis recaptures you ..."

"Anubis mentioned an escape committee. You're part of it?"

Boris said nothing. Only her deep infrared vision picked up the teltale flush of his cheeks, the ruddy betrayal of the pulse in his emaciated wrists.

"You're part of the escape committee," she confirmed. "Looking for a way to crash Anubis' defenses. There'll be dumb backups on a colony this size, even inferior AI's, spaceship autopilots --"

His pupils widened. "How did you know?"

Oshi shrugged, thumped the ground between them with one hand. "This didn't come from nowhere. I'd guess there's an extensive mining fleet out there. Maybe warships, too; anything Anubis trusts to help defend him from the inevitable. The Ultrabright attack."

Boris shook his head. "We were afraid they would follow us. We never even saw them enter our system, you know. We had the usual defenses against rogue colony probes: a hundred thousand orbiting combat drones, coilguns on the near moons, distant warning links in the outer asteroid belt. All for nothing when the berserkers appeared. They came from nowhere, nowhere at all. And we were afraid they'd follow us. So we ran at random, uploading and beaming out blind without waiting for a return packet to confirm the link."

"That was a bad idea," Oshi said absently. "All you did was demonstrate a bolt-hole to the Ultrabrights. According to my briefing they're not good at thinking in normal spacetime terms -- they're not native to this universe: they evolved in the dreamtime, where the normal rules don't hold -- but they can learn. And Anubis pulling in all his antennae probably didn't do any good either. It made my Boss send me here. It will have been noticed elsewhere. And then committing genocide by omission, by refusing to download the stream of exiles who followed your team out here on a blind ticket to nowhere -- it wouldn't surprise me if Anubis is terrified of being found out. He's the self-appointed guardian of souls and gatekeeper of the land of the dead. Losing a few million won't have done his self-esteem any good."

She noticed that Boris didn't seem to be paying any attention. He was looking away from her. " How can you say that?" he sent, too overcome by emotion to speak out loud. " Millions dead, and all you can do is talk about the self-esteem of their murderer --"

"It's a dangerous galaxy out there. I've seen enough of it to know." Oshi threw her grass stem away. A momentary wave of self-disgust, exquisitely sharp, swept over her: "I've been part of it for too long. There are things you don't want to know, believe me."

"Oh, I believe you." He was talking again. "I'm not some innocent colonist expecting a primordial paradise world tended by robots, you know. Some of us had to know what it was like out there. I had to negotiate with Superbrights; you have to know how to dine with the devil with a very long spoon. I'm a diplomat -- I know the score. To tell the truth, I expected to die when I lay down on the gatecoder pad and let them feed me into it. It's just that this exceeds my wildest dreams." He chuckled painfully. Oshi looked round quickly, but there was no sign of movement; nothing disturbed the peaceful chirruping of the digital insect life or the rasp of the omnipresent cicadas.

"We'd better be moving," she said. "Do you know anywhere secure to go to ground in?"

Boris coughed, clearing his throat. "The necropolis," he suggested. "Anubis modeled the colony area on an historical scenario, something to do with his identity. Where he came from. There's an entire quadrant of the town given over to tombs. Nobody lives there; mostly nobody goes there. Even the goons stay out. There's nothing there but a load of dry bones."

"Whose corpses are they?"

"We don't know. Ours maybe, from earlier download attempts while Anubis was fine-tuning the gatecoder. Whatever, it will be a good place to wait. When I make contact --"

"What?"

"You don't need to know ... just yet."

The day grew hot and bright, chasing the whisps of fog away from under the trees and baking the air into a quiet inferno. Oshi carried Boris deeper into the trees, then fashioned a hide in the deep grass; then she hunkered down.

"What are you waiting for?" Boris asked after an hour.

"That question, more or less." Oshi sat up cautiously, glanced round, and lay down again close by. "Lie low. Stay off wisdom. Let's just wait and see. My bet is, if there's a massive response the city will be the first target. Don't want to be on-line or visible when Anubis starts interrogating the upload transceivers throughout the colony."

"It's never happened yet." Boris blinked rapidly, as if he had a dust-mote in one eye.

"Even when you tried to kill him?"

"No --" he stared at Oshi. "You a mind reader or something?"

"Peace is my profession," she said ironically. "Diplomacy -- by any means necessary."

"Huh." He sounded gloomy. "Massive response. Anubis is beyond a massive response. He's forgotten everything; even what he is. Everything except how to rip your guts out. Crude."

"He's a Superbright telefactor, then?" Oshi probed.

"Ack. His main point of presence exists in the dreamtime on Pascal, and the propagation delay between it and his download body --" Boris stopped. "How much do you know about this system?" he asked.

Oshi smiled at him, tight-lipped. "I was sent here at short notice. Very short notice."

"I see." He was silent for a moment. "Well, it's like this." He picked up a twig and scratched out a crude map in the dirt: "here's the star, Ridgegap-47. It's a smallish G-type, no binary companion. First in are a couple of dirt-balls, hot as molten lead and twice as unpleasant. Nothing there but some robot relay stations. Next out is Wirth, the terraforming project. It's a Venusiform environment. Anubis is meant to be building aerominers to blow holes in the cloud layer and shut down the greenhouse, but it's gone to pieces and the whole operation is running on automatic. There are some ships connected with it, drones running out into the near cometary belt and tipping ice cubes down the gravity well. But it's more or less going on all by itself. He won't even let us near the ships."

"Yes, but where are we?"

"I'm getting to that." Boris didn't like being interrupted. He moved his finger through the dirt, drawing a concentric circle far outside the orbit of Wirth. "There's a gas giant called Turing. Saturn-sized, medium-scale. It's got a couple of large moons, including Pascal. We're in L5 relative to Pascal, leading it by sixty degrees in its orbit. Pascal is the local Dreamtime world; covered thigh deep in slabs of superconducting circuitry and junk robot farms. I guess the idea was that this colony would be useful for supervising outer system mining operations; can't think why, seeing the system had no-one home except Anubis until we arrived."

"Makes sense," Oshi commented. "Strategically. If there are no other gas giants in the system it gives you a hydrogen monopoly."

Boris looked at her oddly. "You have been studying, haven't you? What do they call you? A military advisor?"

"Think of it as the deluxe courier service."

"I'd rather --" Boris coughed. "Stop. Look, we're here. Anubis controls, uses, the entire Pascal dreamtime, about two million kilometres away. But he's invested his corporeal body with almost all his sensory input: it's his virtual psychocentre. His real mind's point of presence is twelve light-seconds away by return signal, but his sense of identity is right here. Causes quite a hitch, doesn't it?"

"It sounds dumb. What it must feel like --" Oshi stopped. What would it be like if there was a fifteen second delay between sticking your hand in a fire and being able to do anything? But hey -- Anubis reacted too fast for that. So -- "he must have a chunk of his personality downloaded into that meat machine. And it takes fifteen seconds for his mind to catch up with whatever he does."

"Yeah. Anubis is very smart if you give him time to think, but slow on the uptake. He's bottlenecked, like the dreamtime itself -- held up by the speed of light and the performance he can get out of any one node."

"You're going to take out the connection to Pascal and ice his body while it's waiting for instructions?"

"We thought of that. It didn't make sense. Believe me, he's got some pretty lethal low-level defenses. The goon squad, for one thing -- semi-autonomous drones, spun off from his worst nightmares. All breaking the link would achieve would be to get Anubis mad at us. No." Boris levered himself up on his elbows. "What we want is something more; we want to blow his higher consciousness away completely, to clear the dreamtime and take control of the machinery so we can beam out of here, out to the net. But we weren't sure that connection still existed ... until yesterday."

Oshi pointed at herself, raised her eyebrows: Boris nodded.

"Right. Your arrival puts everything in a different perspective. Especially if you're right and we're going to get hit fairly soon. Though how you can be sure of that --"

"I'm not." Oshi looked up at the forest canopy above. "It just makes sense if you look at things a certain way. The Ultrabrights know which direction you went in, you can be sure of that. They'll reason that there's a suitable system out here -- they won't question your motives. Plus, neighbouring worlds have been going down without warning -- not just dropping their transport layer protocols, but switching off in mid-transmission as if the plug's been pulled. I figure you drew down a full-scale offensive in this sector when you beamed out here; and it will be arriving in-system real soon now. In fact, I'm surprised it isn't already --" her eyes widened.

"What is it?" Boris demanded.

"Sod waiting out Anubis's response. If it happens, it happens; but from what you say ... we'd better get moving. Do your people have access to a telescope?"

"They'd better." Boris tried to sit up but was still too weak to manage it on his own. Oshi stood up and leaned down, pulled him to his feet. They stood unsteadily. She noticed that she was acutely thirsty and her arms ached. "What do you want a telescope for?"

"Got to take a star check. I've got a nasty idea -- and if I'm right, we don't have much time to do something about Anubis."

It wasn't going too well. Boris was so weak he could barely walk; Oshi felt drained, and despite an overwhelming sense of urgency she was not strong enough for two.

"Not far," Boris panted as they stumbled onto a narrow path through the undergrowth. "These woods don't go far. Stop outside