'She has always seen further than most,' Unlikely Worlds said. 'That's one of the things that makes her so special. That, and her belief that the trick to living for ever is to never die.'

'That ship is due to arrive at its destination around about now,' Tony said. 'It is quite the coincidence, isn't it? That the end of that old ship's long voyage should coincide with the discovery of stromatolites containing a Ghajar eidolon, and with Ada Morange's escape from my family.'

He wanted to say more, wanted to ask Unlikely Worlds if he had pointed Ada Morange towards the stromatolites, but he knew that the !Cha would almost certainly deny it, and there was no way of forcing the truth out of him. There were stories that people had made !Cha give up their secrets by threatening to boil their tanks, or stamp them flat in industrial hydraulic presses, or cut them open with industrial lasers, but no one knew anyone who had actually done it. The !Cha were clever enough to avoid most dangerous situations, and when cornered had been known to rocket skywards or sideways at tremendous speed.

'It is very interesting,' Unlikely Worlds said, as if considering it for the first time. 'Perhaps Ada found out about the slime planet some time ago. And kept it to herself until this mysterious ship was due to arrive at this mysterious star. Tell me, do you know its location?'

'The records were not clear on that point,' Tony said. 'I was wondering if you knew anything about it.'

He had to imagine the !Cha's shrug, but it was definitely there.

'Wherever she has gone, isn't it wonderful to contemplate the way she has transcended her limitations? What ingenuity! What determination!'

'She appears to believe that I may be useful to her,' Tony said. 'That is why she helped me to escape from Bob and Bane.'

'Yes, it's all so very tasty.'

'She told me that my eidolon had changed in interesting ways. She also told me to use the paths of the dead, and showed me the way with a little light. And that little light led me to you. You knew all along that Adam Apostu was her hand, so I cannot help wondering if you have had secret dealings with her. If you are planning to lead me to her.'

'Don't you want to find her?'

'Of course. But I don't want to be delivered to her like some package.'

'When humans lack all the facts of the case, they spin stories to fill the gaps,' Unlikely Worlds said. 'So allow me to substitute fact for fiction. That little light was an eidolon originally controlled by Ada Morange's hand. I reached out and took control of it, and used it to lead you to me. So you see, there was no collusion between us. Quite the opposite.'

'You can control eidolons?'

'You are wondering if I can control the one in your head. If I can force it to tell me what it is, and what it wants. Alas, I cannot. It is too potent and has too much self-knowledge. But I can overmaster some of the lesser ones,' Unlikely Worlds said. 'Including those that Ada employed to gather information about the dealings of brokers and traders in Tanrog. You told me what happened in Adam Apostu's house. I admit now that I saw it all, using Ada's little spies. You are a resourceful young man, and I knew you would be able to turn the confrontation between the hand and Raqle Thornhilde's dullard sons to your advantage. As you did, with only a small amount of help from me. And here we are, and both of us still want the same thing and need each other's help to find it, so I hope we can trust each other.'

'Talking of help, perhaps you can help me to find a way to unblock my comms,' Tony said. 'I need my ship, and she is still stuck on Dry Salvages.'

'Why don't we ask Victor? He knows all kinds of people.'

The speaker for the dead listened to Tony's explanation about how his comms had been silenced, and said that he believed that he knew someone who might be able to help.

'He's a fair way from here, though. Two or three days' walk.'

'Isn't there anyone in the city who can help me?' Tony said.

'No doubt, lad,' Victor said. 'But that's skinwalker business. You'd have to ask one of them.'

'Two or three days walking, it isn't anything,' Unlikely Worlds said cheerfully. 'And who knows what we'll learn along the way?'

43. Different Maps.

Lisa hung weightless in the dark, trying to focus her entire attention on the crystalline cadences of Bach's Goldberg Variations. Sometimes, her concentration faltering, she would fall back into her self, feel the tug of the straps across her body, the delicate tug of the lodestar, and she'd have to start over. Find the shape of the melody again, follow it note by note through its turns and elaborations, dissolve in its timeless sea.

Just after the emphatic flourish at the beginning of the sixteenth variation, a voice cut into her reverie, saying, 'Thank you, Ms Dawes. I believe we have enough now.'

Light rimmed the contours of Lisa's eye mask. She pulled it off, blinking in the glare shining off the white curves of the cargo pod, unplugged her earbuds. She was strapped into a cradle that allowed her to rotate in every direction, presently suspended slantwise to the long axis of the cylindrical volume. Two technicians hung amongst a clutter of touch screens at the far end. One of them grinned, gave her the thumbs-up.

Later, with the ship under way towards the wormhole, Isabelle Linder showed the results to Lisa. Here were the two plots previously established at Terminus and the L5 point between Earth and the Moon, lines laid across the spiral swirls of the Milky Way like a lopsided X. And here was the plot established by the latest measurements, at the L5 point in the orbit of the water world Hydrot, crossing the point where the first two intersected, turning the X into a distorted asterisk.

It was an amazingly simple experiment. Three times, around three different stars scattered across the spiral arms of the Milky Way, Lisa had been strapped into the cradle in the ship's cargo pod, in free fall. And each time, while losing herself in music, she had slowly and unconsciously revolved, little shifts in muscle tone pushing against the cradle until her body was orientated towards the lodestar that faintly, constantly nagged at her. She'd seen video of herself, shot in infrared. Horribly fascinating to watch the muscles of her arms and legs clenching and twitching, shifting her orientation by degrees until she was aimed like an arrow in the right direction. Lisa Dawes, human compass needle.

Now, after averaging out the results of this latest run of tests, they knew where she was pointing to. More or less. Isabelle magnified the image, stars streaming out of the frame as she zoomed towards the intersection of the three lines. With the Sun at twelve o'clock in the Milky Way's spiral clock face, it was roughly at five, near the outer edge of the Scutum-Centaurus Arm.

The intersection wasn't especially precise. At ninety-five per cent probability, it encompassed a globe with a radius of approximately twenty-six light years. Even out there, where stars and dust thinned towards intergalactic space, this volume, around seventy thousand cubic light years, contained twenty-two known stars and probably an equal number of dim red dwarf stars and brown dwarfs yet to be discovered.

'I guess we need more measurements to refine this,' Lisa said.

'Actually, this is good enough,' Isabelle said.

'I can't see how it can be, unless you mean to check out every star.'

Isabelle smiled like a little girl whose birthdays have all come at once. 'Ah, but we do not need to. Because, you see, this confirms something we already know.'

Lisa felt a sudden scratch of caution. These people and their fucking mysteries. She said, 'What do you know? And how do you know it?'

'The Professor will explain, when we return to Terminus.'

'Can't she tell me now?'

'She is very pleased, Lisa,' Isabelle said. 'I have given her the results. And now she wants to talk to you in person.'

Lisa had been working for Karyotech Pharma for more than six weeks, but she had yet to meet its CEO, unless you counted the one time immediately after she had arrived, when the people guiding her through the free-fall corridors of the docks had suddenly swum aside to make way for an oval football-sized drone. The little machine had orientated itself towards Lisa and the screen at its blunt end had lit up, displaying Ada Morange's witchy-wise face. They'd exchanged maybe thirty words, Ada Morange telling Lisa that she looked forward to an interesting and fruitful collaboration, Lisa saying she looked forward to it too, or something equally lame. And then the screen had blanked and the drone had spun around and scooted away, and that was that.

For the first three days, Lisa had mostly talked to lawyers. Or rather, she'd sat in a conference room while her lawyers and the lawyers representing Karyotech Pharma talked to each other. She was 'the client'. The client drank coffee and fretted while lawyers politely disagreed and rewrote sentences to make them less comprehensible to actual human beings. The client wished she could settle everything with a fucking handshake, and get on with it.

Actually, Lisa quite liked her lawyers: Zandra and Nick Papandreou, a husband-and-wife team who'd moved from Canberra to the Commonwealth of Terminus twenty years ago, and had helped draw up the framework of the new nation's legislature. Lisa was living aboard the ship for security, but her lawyers insisted on meeting in the terminal's mall, which was built into one of the enormous transparent bubbles that clustered around the elevator cable at the insertion point with the rock that anchored it in orbit. Like the ship and the rest of the terminal, the bubble was in free fall. Lisa was becoming accustomed to swimming through the spaces of the ship and the corridors and rooms of the Karyotech Pharma suite, but the mall was something else. The first time, she allowed Zandra and Nick to take her arms and kick her across an intimidatingly vast gulf of air to a restaurant adjacent to the wall of the bubble, with a spectacular view of the elevator cable dwindling away to the dappled globe of Niflheimr.

Lisa learned that Niflheimrs spent only a week or two at a time up in the terminal, partly to avoid problems caused by long-term exposure to free fall, partly because they didn't want to spend too much time away from their farms, fishing boats, and plantations. The Commonwealth's worldlets were patchworks of wilderness and farming communities. Private wealth was based on production of food, construction timber, biologics yielded by tank farms and so on. Public wealth was created by the sale and licensing of Elder Culture artefacts, and shared by using a variation of the Scandinavian model, with high and progressive tax rates, and free access to health care, social services and utilities. Infrastructure projects were determined by popular vote; investment in the economies of other worlds was controlled by an elected trust. An ideal model, according to Zandra and Nick Papandreou, for the brave new worlds of the New Frontier.

Lisa also had a meeting with the chief of the local TCU office, a gruff Turkish man with impressive side-whiskers who advised her that it was in her best interests to surrender to him. Lisa was accompanied by her lawyers, who reminded the TCU chief that the meeting was merely a courtesy, and the UN had no authority in the Commonwealth of Terminus.

'Yes, because your Commonwealth wants to grow rich by exploiting artefacts and those who discover them, taking bribes from the likes of Ada Morange, and ignoring all the risks. Don't make that mistake, Miss Dawes,' the chief told Lisa. 'I can promise you that if you surrender voluntarily, all charges pertaining to your recent adventures on First Foot will be dropped. You will be taken into custody, of course, but only for your own protection, so that your condition can be assessed and stabilised.'

'As far as I can see I have the choice of being your lab rat or Ada Morange's,' Lisa said. 'So I think I'll go with the person who'll pay me. If she can't find a cure, maybe I'll be able to afford one of my own.'

And so, after she and her lawyers finally cut a deal and she had signed about thirty copies of a fat contract, Lisa became a research associate employed by Karyotech Pharma on a freelance basis. By this time the !Cha, Unlikely Worlds, had disappeared. According to Isabelle Linder, he had gone across to Ada Morange's timeship. 'I am sure we will visit the Professor soon,' she said. 'I know she has the greatest interest in you.'

Meanwhile, Lisa endured a battery of tests, from straightforward brain scans to psychological assessments, and gave a detailed account of everything that had happened since she'd been struck down in her yard. And then she got to work on the code with the expert from Peking University, Professor Lu Jeu Enge.

He was younger than Lisa had pictured him, a cheerful confident man in his early thirties who worked off his excess energy in pick-up games of free-fall basketball, and planned to spend a couple of weeks hiking the lake country of Niflheimr's north pole once what he called his fieldwork was finished. They bonded over their interest in the narrative code, and a shared incredulity about the daily group-think meetings before the start of work, when Isabelle Linder and the research team gathered to discuss that day's goals and yesterday's successes and failures, and to reaffirm their loyalty to their company and to each other.

'I am not completely sure why I am here,' Enge told Lisa. 'I do not subscribe to their personality cult, and they don't want me to unravel the code, but to discover instead what you see in it. Hardly a precise match to my area of expertise. However, Karyotech pays extraordinarily well for services they do not really need, I have never before left Earth, and I must admit that I am very curious about your discovery. So here I am.'

'I think it's partly because Ada Morange doesn't want the geek police to hire you,' Lisa confessed.

'All I can say is that it is nice to be wanted, for whatever reason,' Enge said. 'And their facilities are first-rate. Even if I fail to contribute anything useful, I believe that I will learn much. What about you, Lisa? You obviously have reservations, yet here you are. What made you choose to throw in with them?'

'It wasn't so much a conscious choice,' Lisa said, remembering some favourite books from her childhood, 'as a series of unfortunate events.'

She and Lu Jeu Enge ran and reran the Ghajar narrative code that Karyotech's coders had extracted from the tesserae that Lisa had brought with her. Code that Willie's eidolon had injected into the Ghostkeeper matrices at the moment of his death, code which Lisa believed might contain some trace of his essence, although she saw in its silvery flow only the same knots and nodes that she'd seen in the code she and Bria had pulled from the tessera Willie had entrusted to his girlfriend.

Enge used a tool developed by his research team to refine the location of the nodes, and to capture and calibrate the changes they imposed on the code's flow. According to him, they appeared to be emergent properties, a typical feature of Ghajar narrative code.

'It is more like a symphony than a written language,' he said. 'The analogy is imperfect, of course, but it makes a useful working model. So far, we have had no success in translating it, but your ghost may provide an interesting baseline. Something that until now we have lacked.'

'Like a key?'

'Perhaps. But we may never know if anything we read in the code has equivalence with the way the Ghajar read it.'

'My ghost sees things differently. So perhaps I see things differently too.'

'Even so, you may not see what it sees. It is a matter of compatibility and interpretation, of neurological hard-wiring.'

One day, details Lisa hadn't seen before began to pop out of the flow. She lost track of time, watching them, didn't realise Enge had left her alone until he returned with a pad of paper and a Sharpie.

'You were making movements with your right hand,' he said. 'As if writing or drawing. Perhaps you could watch again, pen in hand. Try not to think about it.'

Two minutes later, they were studying the pattern she'd scribbled. A starburst of lines radiating out from a common point, each line a different length, each of them hatched with three or four short crossbars. It was a duplicate of the diagrams that Willie had made on his dying bed; Enge said that it resembled drawings made by the sister of the first person to pilot a Ghajar ship. Like Lisa, the little girl had been haunted by an eidolon, although hers had been encoded in a bead of crystalline material similar to cat's-eye apatite.

'The Ghajar used a variety of media for information storage, just as we do,' Enge said. 'But in both cases, the embedded eidolons extract information in the narrative code and render it in the same kind of shorthand visual representation. It is very interesting!'

He told Lisa that Ada Morange had been attempting to unriddle that diagram for twenty years. Back in the twentieth century, two robot spacecraft flying past the planets of the outer solar system into interstellar space had carried plates engraved with similar patterns: maps of the Sun's location relative to several pulsars, neutron stars that emitted powerful beams of electromagnetic radiation. Because the beams could only be detected when they were directly pointed at an observer, and because the neutron stars rotated very rapidly, spinning many times a second, they appeared to pulse. And because every pulsar spun at a different rate and could be detected over vast distances, they were useful cosmic lighthouses.

Ada Morange believed that the Ghajar diagram was a similar map. The length of each line represented the distance between the pulsars and the target star; the spacing of the crossbars represented the clock time of their pulsing beams. But unriddling the map had proven to be very difficult. It had taken more than a decade to translate the distances into light years and the pulsar clock times into milliseconds, and locating the pulsars was an even harder problem. Their clocks had slowed in the thousands of years since the Ghajar had made their maps, and many were not visible from Earth. Ada Morange was presently engaged in a vast and vastly expensive project to map the positions of every star and pulsar in the galaxy, using flocks of cheap telescopes put into orbit around the gift worlds and the worlds of the New Frontier.

Lisa's map was not identical to the little girl's. Perhaps it used different pulsars to point to the same target; perhaps it pointed elsewhere. Lu Jeu Enge turned the results over to Karyotech's research team and rode down to Niflheimr for his hiking vacation; Lisa and the research team moved on, developing a way to pin down the location of her lodestar. And now she was heading back to Terminus and a face-to-face meeting with Ada Morange. She believed that she had redeemed something useful from Willie's death and wanted to ask Ada Morange to make good her promise to find a way to exorcise her ghost. But the billionaire, it turned out, had very different plans.

44. The Paths Of The Dead.

Victor Ursu led Tony and Unlikely Worlds along branching paths that descended ever deeper underground. A kilometre of construction coral massing overhead like compressed time. Darkness profounder than night lying everywhere beyond the sparklight that Victor floated for the convenience of his guests he usually navigated lightless stretches of the paths of the dead by echoes returned from clicks of his tongue. They edged along a rift that plunged to unguessable depths. They passed through a long low cavern where Ghostkeepers had carved rows of tombs in the construction-coral walls. Eidolons crouched like twists of frozen smoke in several of the tomb mouths, chittering and snapping as they went past. They saw no other sign of life on the long hike, although sometimes Tony felt that there was a fourth member of their little party. An unglimpsable presence haunting the shadows at the outer edge of his field of view, unremarked by his companions.

Tony was certain that the eidolons in those tombs had sensed it, knew that Ada Morange had some idea of its abilities and intentions it was why she had helped him to escape and suspected that Unlikely Worlds knew something about it too. But so far it had made no attempt to communicate with him, not even in dreams. It was as if he was carrying a stowaway who evaded his every attempt to find her, and left no clues about her identity or purpose.

He told himself that it did not matter what the eidolon wanted, if it wanted anything at all, as long as it helped him to find Ada Morange and the Red Brigade. Nor did it matter if Unlikely Worlds was slyly manipulating him, and might be planning to sacrifice or betray him when he was no longer useful. At the moment it was enough to be moving. There was a kind of reckless freedom in being caught up in the plots of powerful, enigmatic creatures, and defying them to do their worst.

As they walked, Victor told stories about the wonders and mysteries of the paths of the dead. On the far side of the raft, he said, the remains of a city once inhabited by an aquatic Elder Culture were submerged in an underground lake that was connected to the sea by several long flumes. Some claimed that unlike other Elder Cultures this species had not died out or evolved into something else, but had retreated into the deeps of the world-girdling ocean. Others said that it was not an Elder Culture at all, but was native to Veles. There were tales of a lost fleet of spaceships crushed in matrices of construction coral and haunted still by the eidolons of their control systems; of caves containing stepped pyramids built by humans kidnapped from Earth long before the Jackaroo had made contact; of a race of small, secretive creatures, degenerate descendants of an Elder Culture, that inhabited chambers where they farmed fungi and kept herds of scrabs that they tapped for their haemolymph, and sometimes emerged at night to steal food and trinkets from houses in the city. There was a story about tomb raiders who, after being trapped in a labyrinth by malicious eidolons, had resorted to cannibalism. The last survivor had been discovered wearing a cloak made from the skins of his companions. Another told of a cult that had tweaked themselves to digest blood and lured the unwary to dungeons where their victims were bound and hung from hooks and drained over days and weeks.

Some of Victor's stories were new to Tony; others were variations of travellers' tales he had heard in bars and cafes on other worlds. When Tony pointed this out, the speaker shrugged and said why not? Stories ended up in the paths of the dead along with everything else.

'This is the place where things long forgotten on the skin are still remembered,' he said. 'Although time moves at the same rate below as above, decay does not. After all, that's why people keep their dead down here. So it shouldn't be surprising that the oldest stories can also be found here, long after they have been forgotten on the skin.'

Tony asked Unlikely Worlds if he had ever collected any of Victor's stories.

'Some of them are undeniably pretty,' Unlikely Worlds said, which Tony took to mean yes.

'If you know so many stories,' he said to Victor, 'why is it you owe a favour to Unlikely Worlds, and not the other way around?'

'Why do you think I owe him any kind of favour?' Victor said.

'Isn't that why you're helping us?' Tony said.

'To discharge a debt?' Victor laughed. 'That's skinwalker thinking, lad. I'm helping you because that's what we do, down here.'

'Would you help Raqle's boys, if they asked you to find me?'

'But they haven't asked,' Victor said, as if it was the most reasonable thing in all the worlds.

After a little while, walking down what seemed an endless stone gullet that rose and fell in long undulations (a solution tube carved, Victor said, by water that dissolved the rock rather than eroding it), Tony said that he didn't think there was as much difference between the surface and the paths of the dead as Victor claimed.

'We rely on the dead too. Not our own dead, but the dead of the Elder Cultures. Most of our technologies are derived from Elder Culture artefacts. Even our ships were built by long-dead aliens. We don't make anything new any more. We don't search for new knowledge. We dig up old knowledge in tombs. And every world is a tomb world.'

'And yet you make new stories,' Unlikely Worlds said.

'Are they really new? Or are they like Victor's stories? Variations on old tales. New flesh on old bones.'

The !Cha did not reply.

Tony said, 'Did the Elder Cultures die out because they lost themselves in the past of others? Because they could no longer think of anything new, or anything that hadn't been thought by others long ago?'

'The galaxy is old,' Unlikely Worlds said. 'And full of old things. You and your kind are blessed with a rare gift: you are young, and still curious, and not yet jaded. Don't grow old before your time.'

'Is that a warning?'

'Think of it as a useful motto.'

They spent the second night in a Ghostkeeper catacomb. The honeycomb of small chambers was entirely free of eidolons; tomb raiders had long ago taken the stones in which their algorithms ran. There were foam pads to sleep on, and a store of food and equipment free for any to use. Tony took a brief shower in freezing water and slept deep and long, with no dreams that he could remember.

The next day, they followed passages that mostly sloped upwards. At one point they emerged into a long chamber where rain and shafts of light fell through holes in the high roof and mosses and filmy sail-sedges grew on mounds of rubble, their living reds and yellows vivid and startling after the endless stone of the underground. They were near the skin of the world now, but were still more than a day's walk from their destination. A passage on the far side of the sunlit chamber sank into the construction coral again; a transparent plastic bridge crossed a stream that ran swiftly over bone-white flowstone and suddenly whirlpooled down a solution hole.

Down again. Down into the dark.

They made camp in a cave whose roof had partly collapsed. It was night, out on the skin: the ragged hole framed a black sky thick with stars. Victor showed Tony how to shape a comfortable hollow in the soft white sand of a dry stream bed. Lying there, his head pillowed on his folded jacket, Tony thought of Abalunam's Pride, somewhere out there amongst all those bright stars, hoped that she would come when he found a way to call her, and hoped that Colonel X had left some kind of spyware in the bridle or the lifesystem. After the kidnapping on Dry Salvages, Tony knew that he couldn't rely on the colonel's help, but now, lost in the paths of the dead, he nurtured the small hope that this adventure was part of the colonel's plan to find Ada Morange, and that at the crucial moment he would come to Tony's aid.