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wonder that he himself felt. ‘Even if there’s no one – and almost certainly there’s no one – there will be tech, functioning tech. Something waiting there for us for thousands of years. Just for us.’
    For a moment this revelation was strong enough that their generalized low-level dislike of him almost vanished. They were three shepherds leading their human flock to a new, promised land. They were the founding parents of the future.
    Then Guyen clapped his hands. ‘Fine. Good work. I’ll have the
Gilgamesh
wake key personnel in time to start deceleration. We’ve won our gamble.’ No words said for all those left behind, who had not even been given the chance to play, or to wonder about the handful of other ark ships that had taken different courses, the Earth spitting out the last gobbets of its inhabitants before the rising tide of poison overcame it. ‘Back to your slabs, both of you.’ There was still at least a century of silent, death-cold travel between them and the signal’s source.
    ‘Give me just half a watch awake,’ Holsten said automatically.
    Guyen glared at him, remembering suddenly that he had not wanted Holsten among Key Crew – too old, too fond of himself, too proud of his precious education. ‘Why?’
    Because it’s cold. Because it’s like being dead. Because I’m afraid I won’t wake up – or that you won’t wake me. Because I’m afraid.
But Holsten shrugged easily. ‘Time enough to sleep later, isn’t there? Let me look at the stars, at least. Just half a watch and then I’ll turn in. Where’s the harm?’
    Guyen grumbled his contempt at him but nodded reluctantly. ‘Let me know when you go back. Or if you’re last man up, then—’
    ‘Turn out the lights, yes. I know the drill.’ In truth the drill was a complex double check of ship’s systems, but the
Gilgamesh
itself did most of the hard stuff. All of Key Crew were taught how to do it. It was barely more taxing than reading down a list: monkey work.
    Guyen stalked off, shaking his head, and Holsten cocked an eye towards Lain, but she was already going over the engineering readouts, a professional to the last.
    Later, though, as he sat in the cupola and watched the alien starfield, two thousand years from any constellations that his ancestors might have known, she came to join him, and sat with him for a fidgety fifteen minutes without saying anything. Neither of them could quite voice the suggestion then, but, by raised eyebrow and abortive hand movement, they ended up out of their shipsuits and clasped together on the cool floor, whilst all of creation wheeled gently overhead.

2.2 EARTH’S OTHER CHILDREN
     
    The name she answers to has both a simple and a complex form. The simple form comprises a series of telegraphed gestures, a precise motion of the palps conveying a limited amount of information. The longer form incorporates a backing of stamping and shivering to add a subtle vibrational subtext to that crude flag-waving, varying with mood and tense and whether she speaks to a dominant or submissive female, or to a male.
    The nanovirus has been busy, doing what it can with unexpected material. She is the result of generations of directed mutation, her presence mute witness for all those failures who never bred. Call her Portia.
    To travel the forest is to travel the high roads, branch to branch, each tree a world in miniature – crossing where the branches touch: now upside down, now right side up, scaling vertical trunks then leaping where the branches give out, trailing a lifeline and trusting to the eye and the mind to calculate distance and angle.
    Portia creeps forwards, judging ranges: her branch juts out into the void, and she spends a careful minute considering whether she can make the jump to the next, before deciding that she cannot. Above her the canopy fades out into a network of twigs that can’t possibly bear her weight. Portia is far larger than her tiny ancestress, half a metre from fangs