'Did you ever ask yourself how you got here, Mr Nevers? The way I see it, we've both been manipulated by those showroom dummies from the get-go.'

Lisa didn't believe for a moment that the avatars were disinterested observers of the antics of their clever, curious monkey clients. The Jackaroo had helped dozens of client races. Hundreds. All of them had spread through the wormhole network and all of them had vanished, destroying themselves in catastrophic wars, evolving into something beyond human comprehension, or simply dying out, stretched too thin by the effort of embracing the Jackaroo's gifts. No one knew. All the Jackaroo would say was that every client found its own path. But one thing was clear: none of their clients had survived contact unchanged.

She looked again at the avatars, floating there like a too-cool-for-school trio of pop stars, and said, 'I have a question.'

'Of course.'

It was the left-hand one who spoke this time. Lisa looked straight at it, her face dimly reflected in its dark glasses.

'The eidolon inside my head. Can you speak to it?'

'We know it was once like you.'

'Is it one of your clients?'

'Those clients have moved on.'

'The eidolon didn't. What does it want?'

'It should speak for itself,' the middle Jackaroo said.

'It's interesting. You say you want to help. It's your tag line. Your USP. But whenever you're asked anything you put on this act, all aloof and fucking mysterious. You tell us that we have to choose our own path, and then you push us in the direction you want us to go. That's why you're here, isn't it? To make sure Mr Nevers does the right thing.'

'There is always a choice,' the left-hand avatar said. 'Even the straightest path has two directions.'

'Not as far as I'm concerned,' Lisa said. 'I travelled into the future, and I can't go back.'

Man, she could so do with a cold tall one right now. She could see the amber liquid pouring into the glass, the rising head of foam, smell that yeasty tang . . .

'Then find another path,' the middle avatar said.

'Or choose not to follow it,' the right-hand avatar said.

The three of them in their fucking sunglasses and black tracksuits, so above it all.

Lisa said, 'Do you believe this bullshit, Mr Nevers?'

'I believe that I'm doing the right thing,' Nevers said calmly.

'You think they're helping you, but you're really part of their plan to stop us finding anything that might actually reveal what's really going on.'

But she knew she'd never make him see that. He'd pared his life down to this single purpose. He'd exiled himself into the future because of it. He'd dedicated himself to it like some kind of warrior saint, and probably rededicated himself twice daily.

'You're angry and confused,' he said. 'But mostly you're afraid. It's entirely understandable, given the way Ada Morange tried to use you, and where you've ended up because of it. In your situation? I wouldn't trust anyone either. But now you have an opportunity to put all that right.'

'Use my powers for good, or some such bullshit?'

'You've already done that, by helping to open up the mad ship,' Nevers said. 'And now Mr Clegg must learn how to talk to it, so that we can ask it nicely if we can ride it through that wormhole. Meanwhile, until I need your help again, I think you should take a well-earned rest.'

'I was kind of hoping I was done here.'

'Oh no. Not at all. We've only just begun.'

54. Aerostats.

As before, Tony sat in the ironwood chair in the red-curtained space he had created. As before, Unlikely Worlds stood beside him. Mina Saba was late. She was calling his bluff. She was planning some baroque punishment for his presumption. And then the window opened, showing the philosopher queen lounging in her sling chair, this time wearing a silvery quilted jacket with a collar that flared behind her head. A small neat woman in her early thirties perched on a stool at her right hand, dressed all in black. Milky skin, red pigment on her lips and the nails of her hands and bare feet, a cap of glossy hair the colour of midnight.

Her smile showed small white teeth. 'Master Tony. I'm so glad that you found your way here.'

It was an avatar of Ada Morange. A version of her younger self before she'd been laminated, or perhaps an ideal image of what she believed to be her true self. She greeted Unlikely Worlds with some warmth, told Tony that she had first met the !Cha on Earth, a century and a half ago.

'I thought him a friend, even though I knew that had I led a life only a little less interesting he would not have troubled to spend a single minute with me. That is to say, whatever passed for friendship between us was a kind of commerce. But it was of no matter. Many of my friendships were based not on sympathy or love, but on reciprocal satisfaction of appetite. So I was neither surprised nor disappointed when, after the difficulty that made me what I am now, his visits ceased.'

'But I never forgot you,' Unlikely Worlds said. 'As you can see.'

Tony believed that Ada Morange's presence was a good sign. That his gamble, telling Mina Saba that he wanted to discuss the mirror floating somewhere in the hothouse planet's clouds, would pay off. But the two women were in no hurry to talk about that; instead, Ada Morange began to tell Tony about aerostats that rode the planet's constant winds, lecturing him about their form and function as Aunty Jael had lectured him on so many different subjects. Either pedagogy was an act she found hard to shake off, or it had been deeply baked into her true self, and preserved after she had been laminated.

She showed him images of streamlined hollow cylinders, told him that they were between a few hundred metres and three or four kilometres long, constructed from thousands of polymer bubbles spun by architectural nanomachines from atmospheric nitrogen and carbonic acid, plankton scooped from the clouds, and minerals collected when the aerostats descended into the furnace of the planet's lower depths and dragged fullerene cables across the baking rocks of the surface. Large aerostats would sometimes break up into daughter colonies, she said, and sometimes two would gently collide, and at the point of contact blisters would swell and froth and release thousands of tiny bubbles containing packages of nutrients and nanomachines. It seemed to be a kind of sexual reproduction.

All the aerostats were empty: any that had once been inhabited must have long ago disintegrated or fallen out of the cloud layer and burned up. Or perhaps it was a mistake to believe that they were floating cities. Perhaps they were factories, or some kind of art, or had been used for sexual or territorial display.

'We know very little about the Ghajar,' Ada Morange said. 'But we do know that they did not much like planetary surfaces. There are thousands of their ships in parking orbits, but they left little trace of their presence on any of the known worlds. Some structures which may have been mooring points, the wreckage of a few crashed ships. But it turns out that we were looking in the wrong place. The Ghajar were creatures of the air. They wrote their signatures on the winds of worlds like this, and left no footprints behind.'

'It's a pretty story,' Mina Saba said. 'But like everything we think we know about the Elder Cultures, that's all it is. A story we tell ourselves to fill the void of our ignorance.'

Tony, unable to contain his impatience any longer, said, 'And what kind of stories do you tell yourselves about the floating mirror?'

'Did you discover that for yourself, or did the !Cha tell you?' Mina Saba said.

'Oh, I wouldn't presume to spoil your surprise,' Unlikely Worlds said.

'Oh, but of course you would,' Ada Morange said. 'You pretend to be helpful, but you are really manipulating us to make our stories prettier. You tried to manipulate me all those years ago, and I have no doubt that you are up to your old tricks again.'

'The !Cha claim to be sympathetic to our ideas, but we have long ago learned not to trust them,' Mina Saba said.

'Tony does not trust me either,' Unlikely Worlds said. 'But like you and Ada, he finds me useful. You have that much in common.'

'Master Tony and I share much more than that,' Ada Morange said. 'I have known him from birth. I trained him. I helped him to become what he is.'

'And all the time you were someone else, and only pretending to be the person I thought I knew,' Tony said. He meant it as a joke, but it was tainted with rancour.

'I was a faithful servant to your family for many years,' Ada Morange said. 'And I still am, after a fashion. Didn't I help you to find your way here?'

'What happened before, it was only business,' Mina Saba said briskly. 'As is this. If you came looking for revenge, you will find only trouble. But if you agree to work with us, we can agree to share what we find.'

'He knows that,' Ada Morange said, smiling at Tony. 'He always was a practical boy.'

Tony wanted to tell her that he knew that she had planned to ransom him in exchange for her freedom, that she had helped the Red Brigade to stage the raid on Skadi. He wanted to ask her why she had told the raiders where to look for him, if she knew that they had been planning to kill him and take his head. If that had been her idea. He wanted to ask her why she had killed Junot Johnson and the police guards, when she could have easily knocked them out instead. Was it because they had defied her by refusing to surrender, by destroying the stromatolites? He wanted to ask her if she felt sorry for the deaths of innocent civilians in Victory Landing, and the damage she had done to his family's reputation. He wanted to confront her with her vile crimes and contemptible betrayals. He wanted to strike her down with great vengeance and furious wrath. But that would have to wait until he could persuade Mina Saba to hand her over. He had an idea about how he was going to do that, but meanwhile he had to pretend that this was just an ordinary business negotiation.

He said, trying to bring the conversation back to the point, 'I saw a little wilderness of mirrors when I came through into this system. Strange mirrors, mounted on flat sheets rather than on the sheer faces of sculpted asteroids. And all of them were dead. Something killed them long ago, and pinched their wormholes shut. But there is at least one live mirror floating in the clouds of that planet, amongst the aerostats. You have not been able to use it, because otherwise you would already be on the other side, and that is why you invited me here, isn't it? You need my help to open it. You need the eidolon I am carrying, the one generated by Ghajar code, the one that has been changed in interesting ways. But before we go any further, I want to know what you hope to find on the other side, and what I will get if I can take you there.'

The two women exchanged a look.

'You always had a sense of entitlement, Tony,' Ada Morange said. 'It isn't your fault. You have been raised to believe that ruling over others is your right, your destiny. But don't think that you are the only key to this particular lock.'

'Yet here I am, because you invited me. Because, I guess, the two wizards you kidnapped were unable to help you.'

'I will admit that there have been certain difficulties,' Mina Saba said.

'We have a mad ship,' Ada Morange said. 'That's what will open the mirror, not your eidolon. But we need your eidolon to take control of the mad ship.'

'You said that there have been difficulties,' Tony said. 'What kind of difficulties?'

'That is none of your business,' Mina Saba said. 'What matters now is how we will move forward.'

'If something happened to the wizards, I think it very much is,' Tony said.

'Oh, what's the harm in telling him?' Ada Morange said. 'He came to us willingly, and besides, he's already guessed most of it.'

'Then tell him, why not?' Mina Saba said, with an impatient flick of her hand.

'The stromatolites were badly damaged, and we have been unable to make more copies of the eidolon,' Ada Morange said to Tony. 'As for the wizards, one died of brain-stem failure, and the other killed himself and ten of Mina's people.'

'This was when they tried to take control of the mad ship,' Tony said.

'The wizards were not pilots,' Ada Morange said. 'You are. Your ship has been infected with a copy of the stromatolite eidolon, which has made some interesting changes to its mind. And because you are in intimate contact with it, I believe you have been changed too. I have every confidence that you will be able to do what the wizards could not.'

'Where does it go, this mirror?' Tony said.

'Somewhere only mad ships can go,' Ada Morange said.

'The Ghajar were divided into at least two factions,' Mina Saba said. 'One built the mad ships and the new mirrors. Either as an alternative to the network gifted to them by the Jackaroo, or as entrances to secret or sacred places. The other faction opposed the first. There was a war. It consumed both sides.'

'There are many stories,' Unlikely Worlds said, 'but most follow similar patterns.'

'We are not like the Ghajar,' Mina Saba said sharply.

'I was not thinking of the Ghajar,' Unlikely Worlds said. 'I was thinking of Ada, and an old friend of hers, Adam Nevers.'

'Otherwise known as Colonel X,' Ada Morange said. 'I see that you did not know his true name, Master Tony.'

'I know about Adam Nevers,' Tony said. 'I thought him long dead.'

'He found someone willing to sponsor his stupid quest,' Ada Morange said, 'and he rode a timeship in a circular course to his future. Our present. He was taken in by one of the honourable families, and joined Special Services. Once a policeman, always a policeman. He wants to stop us reaching the other side of the mirror, but you will give us the edge.'

'He and his employer fear new discoveries because they threaten established hierarchies of power and privilege,' Mina Saba said. 'He is the dead hand of the past. And we are the way forward.'

The conversation turned to Tony's rendezvous with the Red Brigade's fleet. He would undergo tests, Ada Morange said, and then the work of preparing the mad ship for transition through the new mirror would begin. Together, Mina Saba said, they would find all kinds of wonders, and remake history.

'It's interesting,' Unlikely Worlds said afterwards. 'You don't trust them, and they don't trust you. Yet you need each other.'

'Who said I need them?' Tony said.

'Oho. Now that is interesting. May I ask what you plan to do?'

'They claim that only a mad ship can open this mirror of theirs,' Tony said. 'I think that I can prove them wrong.'

55. Into Everywhere.

After being debriefed and subjected to a variety of mostly mysterious tests by Adam Nevers's mad little crew of wizards, Lisa was escorted to her cabin and more or less left alone for three days. Space travel seemed to consist mostly of moving through a series of rooms even the tug sort of counted. This one was egg-shaped, about the size of the bathroom in the house she had built on her homestead. Floating in mid-air with her feet towards the hatch, she could reach out and touch the walls on either side. One wall (she supposed it would be the ceiling, when there was gravity) gave off a pale light that could be dialled down but never completely extinguished; a silvery sleeping bag like the cocoon of a giant bug was fastened to another. Webbing pouches contained toiletries, changes of underwear, and grey sweatshirts and loose black pants, a costume that reminded her of childhood ballet classes.

She could invoke wallpaper that turned the room into a glade in a forest, a grassy hollow in an alpine meadow, a bubble floating on a restless ocean, a sandy depression in a stony desert under two suns, so forth. But the illusions were too painful, reminding her of all she had left behind, so she left the walls of the cabin blank, like the prison cell it was.

Food was brought by one or another of her guards, who also escorted her if she needed to use the bathroom, a complicated routine in free fall, involving nozzles and suction devices and wet-wipes. She could access the ship's library via a window that opened in the air, but couldn't get at the stuff she needed histories of the days of future past, documentaries, anything that would give her a handle on where she was. All she could call up were nineteenth-century novels and late twentieth-century TV programmes she vaguely remembered watching with her parents in the long-ago before the Jackaroo came. Alternating Bleak House with random episodes of Homicide: Life on the Streets induced an aching homesickness, part nostalgia, part loneliness. Here she was in the future. There was no going back. And the only person who understood how she felt, the only person who might know the difference between Inspector Bucket and Detective Munch, was her jailer.

Her ghost was a constant vague presence. Sometimes she talked to it, asking questions about the mad ship and the weird mirror, giving running commentaries on whichever programme she happened to be watching at the time. 'I'm trying to teach you how people are,' she said. 'The kind of stories they like.'

She knew that the wizards might be listening in, but she didn't care. Let them think she was going stir-crazy.

The eidolon didn't respond, of course. No voice in her head, no visions or dreams, no lightning-strike revelation. Just the sense that it was somewhere in the tiny room, silently absorbed in its own thoughts.

One day she woke to find that she was lying in her sleeping bag on what had become the floor. The pull was slight but definite, and the spiral track of her lodestar had changed.

'We're on the move,' she said to the eidolon. 'I wonder where.'

No reply, as usual.

Gravity vanished for a few minutes, came back briefly, vanished again. It was like riding a fairground attraction. After two hours it seemed that the return to free fall was permanent. When Lisa asked to use the bathroom her guard wouldn't tell her why the ship had been manoeuvring.

Six days later, watching a random episode of Friends, Lisa drifted down to what was once again the floor. The force of acceleration was stronger this time, and the lodestar was fixed in one place, somewhere beyond the glow of the ceiling.

'We must be heading towards it,' Lisa said to her ghost. 'Is this something to do with you?'

The tug of the lodestar slowly grew stronger until, with an abrupt quantum jump, it was a physical force prying at her mind. She felt everything else fall away, felt the same out-of-body swoon she'd experienced on First Foot when she'd stared too long at the star at the edge of the Badlands. Felt as if she was expanding beyond her body the room the ship into everywhere . . . And then that vastening vanished like a popped balloon, and she was floating in mid-air because gravity had vanished too.

She knew then what had happened. There could be no doubt about it. The wizards had found some way of plugging Dave Clegg into that mad ship, he'd opened the wormhole, and the ship had just gone through it. A little later, the gentle tug of the lodestar came back, roughly ninety degrees from its last position. Lisa supposed it must be the far end of the wormhole. She soon found out that she was wrong.