the galaxy.'
The children drew in breaths of astonishment. There were a few nervous titters.
'How could they worship nothing, miss? You said the heart of the galaxy is a black hole.'
'I did,' Denise agreed. 'And that's what it is. A huge great hole into which everything falls and from which nothing ever returns. It's already eaten millions of stars, and one day it will finish devouring the whole galaxy. But not for billions and billions of years. And that's why the Last Church revered it and studied it. Because finally, all that will be left of the universe is black holes. They will consume galaxies and superclusters alike. Every atom that ever was will be locked inside them, and then they'll merge, eventually into one. And after that...' she teased.
'What?' It was a frantic cry from over a dozen small mouths.
'That's why there was a Last Church, because of the uncertainty. Some of the Ring Empire's astrophysicists said that at the moment when the black holes unite and become one, then a new universe will be born, while others claimed that it's the end of everything forever. The Last Church wanted people who believed that after the unification would come a new universe. You see, as everything in this universe would be absorbed by the black holes, they thought they might be able to influence the outcome. Matter is crushed to destruction inside a black hole, but the Last Church believed it is possible for energy to maintain its pattern inside, either by inscribing it on the crushed matter, or as some independent form. They wanted that pattern to be thought. Souls, if you like. They wanted to send souls into the black heart so that when the end of time came, and the neat order of physics and time fell into chaos, there would be purpose.
'Now as you can imagine, this appealed to Mozark. The sheer worthiness of the concept dazzled him: making sure that existence itself continued. It was something to which the kingdom could devote itself with vigor and enthusiasm. It would also appeal to Endoliyn, he thought. But then he began to have doubts, the same kind of doubts that always threaten religion, no matter how rational its basis. Life is a natural product of the universe; to believe its purpose is to artificially impinge upon the end of time is a huge article of faith. The more he thought about it, the closer the Last Church's gospel seemed to be taken from divine intervention. Their very first physicist-priest had made a choice, and in his vanity wanted everyone else to agree with it. Mozark wasn't sure he could do that for himself, let alone his whole kingdom. For all its grandeur, life is small. To expend it all on a mission that may or may not be necessary in hundreds of billions of years' time was to demand just too much faith. A life in the service of the Last Church wouldn't be spent wisely, it would be wasted. That wasn't what Endoliyn wanted.
'Once again, Mozark returned to his ship, and left the First Church planet to continue his voyage. He rejected the Last Church's abstract spirituality just as firmly as he rejected The City's devotion to materialism.'
Denise looked round at her little audience. They weren't quite as enthusiastic as they had been when she'd told them about the wonders to be found in The City. Hardly surprising, she chided herself; they're too young to be preached at.
'Sometime soon,' she said in a low, awed voice that immediately gained their attention, 'I'll tell you about the Mordiff planet and all of its terrible tragic history.'
The Mordiff planet was another of those legends of the Ring Empire that made the children shiver with chilly delight every time she mentioned it. Thanks to the vague hints she'd dropped, it had taken on the form of a particularly aggressive hell populated by well-armed monsters. Which wasn't quite a fair description, she thought, but for using as a bogeyman threat to get the garden tidied at the end of the day it was just about peerless.
* * *
After work Denise took a tram up to the Newmarket District of town. A twenty-minute ride, moving slowly away from the substantial buildings clustered around the marina and docks, out into the suburbs where the roads were broad, and the shops and apartment blocks had flat unembellished fronts. Long advertisement boards hugged the street corner buildings, no longer screen sheets but simple paper posters. Side roads showed long rows of nearly identical houses, whitewashed concrete walls scabbing and crumbling in the humid salty air, small gardens overflowing with ferns and palms.
She got off a stop from the enclosed mart she wanted, and walked. There were no tourists here, just locals. She strolled casually, taking her time to look in shop windows. The bars that were open all had tables and chairs on the pavement outside; their patrons preferred the inside where the lighting was low and the music loud. A scent of marijuana and redshift lingered around the darkened doorways, thick and sweet enough for her to imagine it spilling over the step like a tide of dry ice.
As she approached one, a triad stumbled out into the bright sunlight, blinking and shielding their eyes while their slim wingshades unfurled from gold nosebridges. They giggled with the profound scattiness that only the truly stoned can manage. Two men in their late twenties, large, manual workers of some kind judging by their overalls, and a woman. She was in the middle, with her arms slung around both of them. Not much of a figure, not terribly pretty, either. Her tongue glistened in the sunlight as she licked one man's ear, shrieking with delight. His hand closed on her rump, squeezing hotly.
Denise stopped abruptly and turned away. Despite the sunlight and humidity, her skin was suddenly chilly. She cursed herself, her weakness. It was just the combination that had caught her off guard. From her angle: two men dragging the woman off. Incipient sex. Laughter indistinguishable from cries.
Idiot, she raged against herself. There was a wild impulse to slap herself hard across the cheek. Knock some sense into you, girl. Would have done it, too, if this wasn't so public.
It was crazy that her body could be so strong, while her mind was so feeble. Not for the first time, she wondered if Raymond and Josep had asked for subtle neurochemical alterations to be incorporated into their modifications. Human psychology was highly susceptible to chemical manipulation. Could you get a drug for cool?
The triad wobbled away around a corner, and Denise started walking again. A couple of deep breaths and squaring her shoulders tautly returned her traitor body to equilibrium.
A curving glass roof ran the length of the mart, branching out in a cruciform shape a third of the way down from the entrance. Inside, the air was conditioned, scrubbed of moisture and dust. Open-fronted shops had speakers blaring out music and amplifying the spiel that the owners shouted without pause. At the front, the majority of shops were protein knitting; taking raw protein cells from the city's food refineries and blending them with various hydrocarbons and baseline compounds to produce textual approximations of original terrestrial food. There were greengrocers with colored globes purporting to be fruits and vegetables, butchers with burger- steak approximations of every animal from sheep to ostriches, fishmongers with glistening white slivers of flesh on crushed ice; shops with fresh pasta, new-baked bread, rice, curry, cheeses, chocolate, speciality teas and coffees. The smells were enticing as she walked past. Plenty of people loitered, haggling over portions, testing their consistency.
Denise made her way to the back of the mart where Like-side Bikes had their shop. Like every bicycle shop in the universe it had a small front area cluttered with bikes still in their wrappings, while a counter partitioned off a workshop full of tools and small boxes of spares. There were three main work areas, centered on elaborate clamps that held the bikes at chest height. All of them were occupied with machines in various states of assembly with mechanics working on them. Cycling was a popular mode of transport in Memu Bay, and business was brisk.
The assistant manager, Mihir Sansome, looked up and immediately abandoned the child's bike he was working on.
'Hi.' Denise flashed him a bright smile. 'Has my order come in yet?'
'I believe so.' Mihir glanced at his two colleagues and gave Denise a twitchy grin.
She kept her gaze level: it was almost a rebuke.
Mihir cleared his throat. 'I'll check.' He went back into the workshop and picked up a box from his work bench. 'Here we go. Front suspension pins, five sets.'
'Thank you.' She put cash down on the counter, separating the notes into two piles. Mihir made a show of swiping the box's strip into the till. Five notes went into the cashbox; the larger pile was deftly folded and slipped into his pocket without his colleagues' seeing. He put the box into a carrier bag and handed it to Denise.
