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computing," he explains at the top of his voice. "Say good-bye to crypto, say hello to the panoptic society. Shake hands with America's missile launch-codes and open the door to the Fourth World War. And that's not the end of it. That's just what the Russkis could be doing. What are the aliens up to?"
    He's a solidly-built man perched on a stool and sprouting curly black hair all over like a burst mattress. He sees us, and a widening circle of others, listening, waves his hands and continues enthusiastically: "That ESA station is a node on the Internet, guys! Who knows what they might have hacked into by now? Hey, if they've been here that long, we can't even trust ourselves, they could've put trapdoors in our fucking DNA back in the Pre-Cambrian ... "
    And somebody else says, "Karl H. Marx on a bicycle, Charlie, aren't aliens enough!" and everybody laughs again.
    I'll say this for those guys, they adapt to the end of the world we've always known faster than I do. They've seen a lot in their time: the Fall of the Wall, the Millennium Slump, the Century Boom, the Unix rollover, the War, the revolution ... By the time Jadey and I have got ready to leave they're talking about how aliens that old must have some really old legacy systems, and that they must be needing contractors, and wondering what their day rate would be ... Bastards.
    3
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    Bat Songs
    Esias de Tenebre, Magnate and Registered Member of the Electorate of the Republic of Nova Babylonia, exhaled the smoke from his joint and gave a modest and not entirely coincidental cough as he passed the rather insalubrious object to the lady at his left.
    "My own small knowledge of terrestriology," he said to the high lord at his right, "is of course" -- he waved a hand, as much to clear the resinous air in front of his mouth as to emphasize his point -- "strictly that of a dilettante." (This was, strictly, a lie. His interest in news from the home planet was obsessive, and profitable.) "However, I can assure you that as of approximately one hundred years ago -- or earlier today, as far as I'm concerned ... " (Great Zeus, this stuff was making him verbose; he'd have to watch that!) " ... no travelers or indeed, ah, involuntary arrivals have turned up claiming a later departure date than your own."
    He wondered if this information would have been worth holding back. Probably not -- and difficult to do in any case, if he wanted to trade information at all. This local lord was shrewd; a stocky, tough-looking man with a battered Roman nose, every plane of his face and neck converging to the flat, brush-cut top of his bullet head. His native speech was a dialect of English, grammatically degenerate compared to those Tenebre had heard before, on Croatan. Even the unfamiliar scientific words in its vocabulary could often be interpreted by deduction from the classical roots. But for this occasion he, like most people present, was speaking in Trade Latin, the de facto lingua franca of the Second Sphere.
    Hal Driver's broad shoulders slumped slightly, and his features hardened after a passing moment of what Tenebre interpreted as sadness, perhaps disappointment.
    "None after 2049, eh? Oh well, I suppose there are two ways of looking at that." He pushed his blue silk shirtsleeves back, planted his bare elbows on the drink-slopped surface of the long hardwood table, cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted for more brandy. Some girl got up from the table and hurried to a distant cupboard.
    "Either we've blown ourselves to hell back there," he continued, fixing Tenebre with a blearily jovial gaze, "or we're expanding into a different sphere -- a Second Sphere of our own, a First Sphere! -- closer to the home sun."
    "That could well be," said the merchant. He diplomatically did not point out that there were several other possibilities, none of them particularly cheering even compared to all-out nuclear war, a procedure which he'd gathered was a faint approximation to the much worse