perhaps one-tenth of one per cent of the entire useful mass in this system. Based on what we’ve seen so far, that liberated mass will be used to make something else. What, I don’t know. But I’m willing to hazard a guess. There’s only one place to go now, only one hierarchy above a gas giant. It has to be the sun. I think they’re going to take it apart.’ ‘You’re not serious,’ someone said. ‘I wish I wasn’t. But there has to be a reason why they haven’t smashed Resurgam yet. I think it’s obvious: they don’t have to. In a while, perhaps much sooner than we’d like, there won’t be any need for them to worry about it. It’ll be gone. They’ll have ripped this solar system apart.’ ‘No…’ someone exclaimed. Thorn started to answer, ready to work on their understandable doubts. He had been through this before, and he knew the truth took a while to sink in. That was why he told them about the shuttles first, so that there would be something they could pin their hopes on. It was the end of the world, he would say, but that didn’t mean they all had to die. There was an escape route. All anyone needed was the courage to trust him, the courage to follow him. But then Thorn realised that the person had said ‘no’ for an entirely different reason. It had nothing to do with his presentation. It was the police. They were coming through the door. Act as you would if you thought your life was in danger , Khouri had told him. It has to look totally credible. If this is going to work — and it has to work, for all our sakes — they have to believe that you’ve been arrested without any foreknowledge of what was going on. You had better struggle, Thorn, and be prepared to get hurt . He jumped from the podium. The police were masked, unrecognisable. They came in with sprays and pacifiers at the ready, moving through the stunned and frightened audience with quick jerky movements and no audible communication. Thorn hit the ground and dashed towards the escape route, the one that would lead to the getaway car two blocks away. Make it look real. Make it look bloody real. He heard chairs scraping as people stood or tried to stand. The crack of fear-gas grenades and the buzz-snap of stun guns filled the room. He heard someone cry out, followed by the sound of armour on bone. There had been a moment of near calm; now it was over. The room erupted into a panicked frenzy as everyone tried to get out. His exit was blocked. The police were coming in that way as well. Thorn spun around. Same story the other way. He started coughing, feeling panic rise in him unexpectedly, like a sudden urge to sneeze. The effect of the fear-gas was so absolute that it made him want to crawl into a corner and cower rather than stand his ground. But Thorn fought through it. He grabbed one of the chairs and raised it aloft as a shield as the police stormed towards him. The next thing he knew he was on his knees, and then his hands, and the police were hitting him with sticks, expertly aimed so that he would have bruises but no major broken bones or internal injuries. Out of the corner of his eye, Thorn saw another group of police laying into the woman with the bad teeth. She disappeared under them, like something mobbed by rooks. While it waited for the singer to finish building itself, the overseer dug playfully through the stratalike memories of its earlier incarnations. The overseer did not exist in any single Inhibitor machine. That would have been too vulnerable a concentration of expertise. But when a swarm was drawn to the site where a local cleansing would be required — typically a volume of space no more than a few light-hours wide — a distributed intelligence would be generated from many less than sentient subminds. Light- speed communications bound together the dumb elements, weaving slow, secure thoughts. More rapid processing was assigned to individual units. The overseer’s larger thought processes were necessarily sluggish, but this was a limitation that had never handicapped the Inhibitors. Nor had they ever attempted to weave together an overseer’s subelements with superluminal communication channels. There were too many warnings in the archive concerning the hazards of such experiments, entire species that had been edited out of galactic history because of a single foolish episode of causality violation. The overseer was not only slow and distributed. It was also temporary, permitted to achieve only fleeting consciousness. Even as its sense of self had come into being it had known with grim fatality that it would die once its duties were accomplished. But it felt no sense of bitterness at the inevitability of this fate, even after it had sifted through archived memories of its previous apparitions, memories laid down during other cleansings. It was simply the way things had to be. Intelligence, even machine intelligence, was something that could not be allowed to infect the galaxy until the coming crisis had been averted. Intelligence was, quite literally, its own worst enemy. It found itself remembering some of the earlier cleansings. Of course, it had not really been the same overseer that had masterminded those extinction episodes. When Inhibitor swarms met, which was rarely, they traded knowledge of recent kills and outbreaks, methods and anecdotes. Lately, those meetings had become more rare, which was why there had been only one significant addition to the library of starcide techniques in the last five hundred million years. Swarms, isolated from each other for so long, reacted cautiously when they met. There were even rumours of different Inhibitor factions clashing over extinction rights. Something had certainly gone wrong since the old days, when the kills had happened cleanly and methodically, and no major outbreaks slipped through the net. The overseer could not avoid drawing conclusions. The great galaxy-encompassing machine for holding back intelligence — the machine of which the overseer was one dutiful part — was failing. Intelligence was starting to slip through the cracks, threatening infestation. The situation had certainly worsened in the last few million years, and yet this was nothing compared with the thirteen Galactic Turns — the three billion years — that lay ahead, before the time of crisis arrived. The overseer had grave doubts that intelligence could be held in check until then. It was almost enough to make it give up now, and let this particular species go uncleansed. They were quadrupedal vertebrate oxygen-breathers, after all. Mammals. It felt a distant echo of kinship, something that had never troubled it when it was extinguishing ammonia-breathing gasbags or spiny insectoids. The overseer forced itself out of this mood. Very probably it was just this sort of thinking that was decreasing the success rate of cleansings. No, the mammals would die. That was the way, and that was how it would be. The overseer looked on the extent of its works around Delta Pavonis. It knew of the previous cleansing, the wiping out of the avians who had last inhabited this local sector of space. The mammals had probably not even evolved locally, meaning that this would only be phase one of a more protracted cleansing. The last lot had really botched things up, it thought. Of course, there was always a desire to perform a cleansing with the minimum amount of environmental damage. Worlds and suns were not to be converted into weapons unless a class-three breakout was imminent, and even then it was to be avoided wherever possible. The overseer did not like inflicting unnecessary devastation. It had a keen sense of the irony of ripping apart stars now, when the whole point of its work was to avoid greater destruction three billion years down the line. But what was done was done. A certain amount of additional damage had now to be tolerated. Messy. But that, as the overseer
