VI
Ren ran down the sands and into the water, shrieking and laughing and splashing. Her long blonde hair turned darker in the water and lay stuck to her skin when she ran back out again. She skipped up to where her mother, Zreyn and Amorphia sat on a gaily patterned rug under a lacy parasol. The girl threw herself at her aunt Zreyn, who grinned and caught her, then let her wriggle free and dash off along the beach, running towards a sea bird which had thought to doze off there; it flapped lazily into the air and flew slowly off, pursued by the whooping child.
The girl disappeared round the side of the long, single-storey house which lay in the dunes behind the beach; the decorated edges of its veranda awnings flapped and rippled in the warm breeze coming in off the sea.
On the porch, the image of Gestra Ishmethit sat, peering intently at the partially built model of a sailing ship sitting on a table. The man himself had his own suite of rooms, off one of the Sleeper Service's warship-stacked General Bays, but he had been persuaded, by Ren, to allow his real-time image to join them most days, and had even started to appear personally for important celebrations. These consisted mostly of Ren's birthdays, which according to her occurred on a weekly basis.
Zreyn Tramow looked over at Dajeil. "Have you ever thought," she said, "of asking the ship to re-create the old place where you used to live?"
"There's still a version of it in that Limited Bay, isn't there?" Dajeil said, looking at Amorphia. The avatar, which sported a simple black pant-skirt and skin which looked like it would never tan, was holding a long blonde hair up to the sun-line, and peering at it. It realised it was being talked to and looked at Dajeil.
"What?" it said, then, "Oh, yes; the bay where Genar-Hofoen was kept. Yes; the tower's still there."
"See?" Dajeil told Zreyn. She rolled along the rug, out of the parasol's shade, closed her eyes, put her hands under her head and lay on her belly, to even up her tan.
"I meant the whole thing," Zreyn said, stretching out on the rug. "The cliffs and everything. Even the climate, if that's possible," she said, glancing at the avatar, which was still studying the sunlight through one of Ren's blonde hairs. "Perfectly possible," it muttered.
"The whole thing?" Dajeil said, grimacing. "But it's so much nicer like this." She reached out across the sand and pulled a straw sun-hat over her head.
Zreyn shrugged. "I'd just like to see it do stuff like that, I suppose." She looked up at the sun-line. "Making and moving all that rock, creating small oceans… You have to remember I don't take all this… power for granted the way you do."
Dajeil folded the sun hat's brim up and squinted at the other woman, who made an awkward gesture.
"Sorry; is my primitiveness showing?"
Zreyn Tramow's stored mind-state had been woken up to tell her that her name at least had been used in the discovered conspiracy. The Sleeper Service had been uncertain about whether this was really necessary, but it was the sort of thing that extreme politeness dictated, and in the aftermath of the brief war, everybody was being almost exquisitely correct. Besides, it had a hunch that she might find the current civilisational situation interesting enough to be re-born, and it rather liked the idea of instigating such a response. The Sleeper Service had been right; Zreyn Tramow had thought the galaxy sounded like a place worth revisiting and had duly been grown a new body, but then, after the ship had stuck around, impatiently, while the various post-debacle inquiries and investigations had been carried out, she'd asked to go with it when it had announced it still intended to go on a rambling retreat.
Gestra Ishmethit, his mind-state plucked from his dying brain in the evacuated cold of the warship halls in Pittance by the guilt-stricken Attitude Adjuster, appropriated from that craft just before it destroyed itself by the attacking Killing Time and subsequently passed on until it came to rest in the restocked memory vaults of the Sleeper Service, had also been woken up and furnished with a new body by that time; death had neither improved his social skills nor sated his urge for solitude and he too had asked to remain aboard the giant ship.
He, Ren, Dajeil and Zreyn were its only passengers.
"Yes, you're being a hick; stop it at once," Dajeil told Zreyn, who shrugged. Dajeil glanced round at the dunes, the golden sand and the bright blue sky. "Anyway, it's a long journey," she said. "Maybe we'll get bored with all this and want it all changed back to the way it was."
"Just let me know," Amorphia said.
Dajeil took another look round. "I'm glad I let you talk me into remaking the old place like this, Amorphia," she said.
"Pleased you like it," the avatar said, nodding.
"Have you decided where we're going yet?" Zreyn asked.
The avatar nodded. "I think… Leo II," it said.
"Not Andromeda?" Zreyn said.
Amorphia shook its head. "I changed my mind."
"Damn," Zreyn said. "I always wanted to go to Andromeda."
"Too crowded," Amorphia said.
Zreyn looked unconvinced.
"We could go there… afterwards?" the avatar suggested.
"Will we even live to see Leo II?" Dajeil asked, opening her eyes and gazing over at the creature.
The avatar looked apologetic. "It will take rather a long time," it admitted.
Dajeil closed her eyes again. "You could always Store us," she said. "Think you could manage that?"
Zreyn laughed lightly.
"Oh, I could give it a try," the avatar said.
Epilogue
call me highway call me conduit call me lightning rod scout catalyst observer call me what you will i was there when i was required through me passed the overarch bedeckants in their great sequential migration across the universes of [no translation] the marriage parties of the universe groupings of [no translation] and the emissaries of the lone bearing the laws of the new from the pulsing core the absolute centre of our nested home all this the rest and others i received as i was asked and transmitted as i was expected without fear favour or failure and only in the final routing of the channel i was part of did i discharge my duty beyond normal procedures when i moved from a position where my presence was causing conflict in the micro-environment concerned (see attached) considering it prudent to withdraw and reposition myself and my channel-tract where for some long time at least it was again unlikely i would be discovered the initial association with the original entity peace makes plenty and the (minor) information-loss ensuing was not as i would have wished but as it represented the first full such liaison in said micro-environment i assert hereby it fell within acceptable parameters i present the entity peace makes plenty and the other above-mentioned collected/embraced/captured/self-submitted entities as evidence of the environment's general demeanour within its advanced/chaotic spectrum-section and urge they be observed and studied free with the sole suggested proviso that any return to their home environment is potentially accompanied by post-association memory confiscation in the linked matter of the suitability of the relevant inhabitants of the micro-environment for (further and ordered) communication or association it is my opinion that the reaction to my presence indicates a fundamental unreadiness as yet for such a signal honour lastly in recognition of the foregoing i wish now to be known hereafter as the excession