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Robbed of the mirrors, Zanzibar was running on emergency power for now. They could endure this for a while, but in the longer run, Risen needed bright skies. The mirrors, Memphis knew, had been made from bits and pieces scavenged from inside Zanzibar and lashed together with haste and ingenuity. The Risen could not have done such a thing on their own back then, but these were different times. They had learned a lot — not least the fact that they did not need human authority or permission to run their own world. Memphis would pick the cleverest of his Risen and assign them the job of making new mirrors. They would succeed — he was sure of it. Fortunately, there was still abundant water and food. After centuries of occupation, it would take more than a few years for Zanzibar’s stone walls to lose all their trapped heat, even if they had popped out far from the warmth of a star. The essentials were still in place. The Risen could live, and keep living, while they addressed their problems in a methodical fashion. They would do what they had always done — place one sure foot in front of another.

When Memphis had satisfied himself that the absolute essentials were in hand (in trunk — he would force his mind out of these old human patterns of speech eventually, but not today) — when all was in trunk — he at last allowed his mind to turn to the question of where they had arrived.

Memphis organised a small expeditionary party. They made their way out through the peripheral tunnels to one of the docking points, where there were windows.

Zanzibar was still turning. It had kept its angular momentum during the translation, which meant there was still gravity in its chambers. The view wheeled around with the clock-like rhythm Memphis had known all his life. Until this latest development, the only significant thing beyond the windows had been rocky, airless Paladin and its single Mandala. He had long been accustomed to the presence of Gliese 163, but the star was always too distant to be anything other than an abstract source of light.

Now a harder and brighter light, a light that was much bluer, much fiercer, streamed through layers of pitted and scratched glass.

‘We will need fewer mirrors,’ Memphis declared.

If they needed mirrors at all. The blaze caused him to squint. He had rarely needed to squint before, so in a way it was encouraging that the old reflex worked as reliably as it did. Their new sun was hotter and bluer than their old one, and it looked larger. He raised his trunk as a point of comparison. He could not quite block the disc of his new blue star, whereas he had never had any difficulty obscuring Gliese 163.

There was a world, too. They were orbiting it. It was hard to tell how big it was — they would need more time to take that sort of measurement. But it was spherical and a very emphatic green, and there was a mottling in that green which did not quite strike him as the kind of pattern that would arise from purely natural processes. Beyond the curve of this new world’s horizon lay an even larger one, and in a dizziness of hierarchies Memphis grasped that, as Zanzibar orbited this planet, so this planet was but a moon of the larger one.

There was much to explore here — much to keep the minds of the Risen occupied.

Memphis became aware of something then — a black object sliding across the patterned face of the green world. It appeared at first to be an extension of the planet’s surface, but as their relative angles diverged he saw that the black object was raised above it, perhaps in its own orbit. It was a flattened six-sided surface, and on it was another Mandala.

The black object was easy to see when it was over the green, but as it slipped beyond the limb of the world he lost track of it. There was another, though. It followed on behind the first, and then there was a third, as if there might be a necklace of them strung around the green world.

So this location had more than one. Zanzibar had come here from somewhere else; from here, presumably, they could also travel to other places.

If they so wished.

The blue sun washed out the stars, but when Zanzibar turned from it, Memphis’s bright-adapted eyes still made out a handful of them. He had never studied the shapes of the stars, the patterns and constellations they formed, but some shiver of disquieting intuition told him that these configurations were not at all familiar, not even to those who had made their home under the alien skies of Paladin. How far had the Risen come?

Did it matter? The Risen were the Risen. This home was their home, wherever it took them.

Presently, as Zanzibar again swung its face back towards the green world, he noticed movement. He stirred, alarmed at first, then realised it would do his deputies no good at all to see him perturbed. So he squared his ears and adopted a posture of studied repose.

‘Visitors.’

Little gold things were crossing space to Zanzibar. They came in several antlike processions, dozens at a time, converging from different directions. Each was a tiny double sphere with many golden appendages. It was impossible to say precisely where they had originated from — the green world, the orbiting Mandalas or the larger planet beyond the green one. Memphis allowed himself a moment’s speculation as to their intentions. Perhaps they meant ill to Zanzibar and its citizens — startled and alarmed by the sudden arrival of this oddly shaped rock. More charitably, though, he could presume their intentions were benign, for the time being, at least.

They would arrive very shortly. It occurred to Memphis that the prudent thing might be to wake up some of the Friends, to see what the humans made of the golden envoys. In time, he decided, he would do just that. The humans were owed their stake in Zanzibar, after all — they would all have to share its spaces for a while.

But for the moment, just for now, the Risen had no need of anyone else.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to the editors who have been involved with this trilogy during its long road to completion — Jo Fletcher, Simon Spanton and Gillian Redfearn in the UK, and Ginjer Buchanan, Lisa Rogers and Diana Gill in the United States, and the many good people at Orion, including (but not limited to!) Charlie Panayiotou, Marcus Gipps and Krystyna Kujawinska who have worked to bring my books into the world, and helped them find their audience, both here and abroad. Thanks also to my agent, the indefatigable Robert Kirby, for endless enthusiasm and support during the long six years that it took to write these books, and to the readers who have followed me from Earth to the waters of Poseidon.

ALSO BY ALASTAIR REYNOLDS FROM GOLLANCZ:

Novels

Revelation Space

Redemption Ark

Absolution Gap

Chasm City

Century Rain

Pushing Ice

The Prefect

House of Suns

Terminal World

Blue Remembered Earth

On the Steel Breeze

Short Story Collections:

Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days

Galactic North

Zima Blue

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