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Much has changed.

The fleet that awaited us was that of the crack Cassini Division (as they proudly call themselves) of the Solar Defence Group, seconded to the Jovian Anomaly Research Committee. Their sole mission is to guard the Malley Mile, and shoot down anything that rises off the Jovian surface. At first they thought we were aliens, or spawn of the fast folk. They were not pleased when we told them we didn’t trust their transmissions either – even if their ships, unlike ours, were big enough (we grudgingly allowed) to support organic life. Eventually they swarmed out, surrounding us like space-suited South Sea islanders, pressing their face-plates to our lenses and (some of them) their tongues to the insides of their faceplates.

Meg took spectroscopic analyses of their tongues and the fog of their laughing breath, and assured me they were of human flesh and blood all right. Then it was our turn to reassure them. They interrogated us for days, and then they relented, and grew us in pods. They kept the pods isolated and at the focus of a laser-cannon battery.

I think they were more relieved than we were when we emerged in human bodies. Generations of viral radio messages from the successive civilisations of the fast folk on Jupiter have left them very cautious about electronic computers. Most of the computing in the Solar System is done on machines that Babbage would have recognised – from his wildest dreams. I have seen these calculating-machines. They fill hollowed mountains. They are powered by dams, cooled by rivers. They are used to solve millions of equations.

The Cassini Division shipped us back to Earth. The transfer orbit took long enough for Meg and I to get properly acquainted, and to become world famous. Everybody over the age of about six had a good laugh when they discovered we’d come to save them from Jupiter’s mad uploaded computer whizz-kids getting to the end of time.

World fame has its disadvantages, especially in a world of thirty billion people. But it comes as something of a relief, after living on a world where the ideas I advocated were the basis of society, and my memory was immortal. In this world, they’re forgotten, and I’m a footnote in old books.

So we wander the Earth, Meg and I, and we talk to people. When we tell them about Ship City, the more they understand the less they like. It seems to them not an anarchy, like they have here in the Solar system, but a divided – and hence multiplied – authority. So we don’t talk much about Ship City. We talk about the desert, and we wait for these strange but somehow familiar folk to ask us, yet again, if we remember the way through the wormhole to New Mars. It is the only subject which brings envy to their eyes. I can see why. The thirty billion have refuted Malthus: everybody’s rich. They’ve refuted Mises: nobody’s paid. They’ve refuted Freud: nobody’s sad.

But it’s kind of crowded.

The probe continues on its near-lightspeed path; the information it sends back is always new, always unexpected. But the most profound datum, to me, was one that came through quite early in its course: the Hubble expansion is local. The probe has gone beyond it, into other, expanding or contracting, regions of space. There was a Big Bang, but it was not the beginning, for there was none. No heat death, no Big Crunch awaits us. These dooms (it now is said) for all their shining mathematical elaborations, were but reflections of a society facing its limits.

There is no end.

Thanks to Carol, Sharon and Michael for love (and peace) while writing the book; to Iain Banks for reading the draft in good drinking time; to Mic Cheetham for believing in it; to John Jarrold for keeping his nerve; to the partisans of Libertaria, and of Nowhere (you know who you are); to Lara Byrne, for an inspiration (and a genotype).

Books by Ken MacLeod

From Tom Doherty Associates

THE FALL REVOLUTION

The Star Fraction

The Stone Canal

The Cassini Division

The Sky Road

THE ENGINES OF LIGHT

Cosmonaut Keep

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