tale, had another child, then accepted an invitation to join Contact's Special Circumstances section and spent nearly a hundred years (as a male) as emissary to the then recently contacted Million-Star Anarchy of Soveleh. Subsequently she became a teacher on an Orbital in a small cluster near the lesser Cloud, published a popular and acclaimed autobiography, then disappeared a few years later, aged 407, while on a solo cruising holiday on an old Dra'Azon Ring.
As for Schar's World, people did go back to it, once, though only after the war was over. Following the departure of the
There was debris. A dump of bodies and all the material from the Changer base, plus the extra equipment brought in by the Idirans and the Free Company, and the husk of the chuy-hirtsi warp animal, all lay buried under kilometres of glacial ice near one of the planet's poles. Compressed into a tight ball of mangled wreckage and frozen, mutilated bodies, amongst the effects cleared from that part of the defunct Changer base which had been the cabin of the woman Kierachell there was a small plastic book with real pages covered in tiny writing. It was a tale of fantasy, the woman's favourite book, and the first page of the story began with these words:
The Mind rescued from the tunnels of the Command System could remember nothing from the period between its warp into the tunnels and its eventual repair and refit aboard the GSV
The Changers were wiped out as a species during the final stages of the war in space.
Epilogue
Gimishin Foug, breathless, late as usual, sizeably pregnant, and who just happened to be a great-great- great-great-great-great-grandniece of Perosteck Balveda (as well as a budding poet), arrived on board the General Systems Vehicle an hour after the rest of her family. The vehicle had picked them up from the remote planet in the greater Cloud where they'd been holidaying, and was due to take them and a few hundred other people to the vast new System class GSV
Foug was less interested in the journey itself than in the craft she would be travelling on. She hadn't encountered a System class before, and secretly hoped the scale of the vessel, with its many separate components riding suspended inside a bubble of air two hundred kilometres long, and its complement of six billion souls, would provide her with some new inspiration. She was excited at the idea, and preoccupied with her new size and responsibility, but she remembered, if a little late, to be polite as she arrived on board the much smaller Range class vehicle.
'I'm sorry, we haven't been introduced,' she said as she disembarked from the module in a gently lit Smallbay. She was talking to a remote drone which was helping her with her baggage. 'I'm Foug. What are you called?'
'I am the
'That's a weird name. How did you end up calling yourself that?'
The remote drone dipped one front corner slightly, its equivalent of a shrug. 'It's a long story…'
Gimishin Foug shrugged;
'I like long stories.'
END