"Hai! Aeeii!" She whooped and laughed, falling through the dazzling air with her mouth agape, white teeth gleaming like lights in the brightness of Tiresias Prime.

Human creation of the genetic criminals of Tiresias, Adriel of Corydon rode upon the back of a wildly bucking plimp -- a raft of skyweed whose touch was painfully poisonous, even lethal, to any other human being on or off the planet. Protected though she was from its malice, the transgenic creature might yet prove murderous even to Adriel if she lost her precarious grip for an instant and tumbled to the rocks far below.

She flew aloft as the plimp crashed through the stinging air, screening with one hand eyes dark as Galactic Rim night, that deepest night where the stars flickered in the emptiness like fire-beetles.

Whipping wind shook her black hair into a tangled stream.

"Come down, child!" Faint and accusing, her matron's voice blew past her ears, lost in the young woman's laughter. Adriel held tight a mass of inflated, toxic bubbles, waving with her free hand. In any other young woman, it would have seemed an act of impudence.

"Another five minutes, gramps," she yelled back. "It's wonderful! Oh, why didn't I ever try this before?"

The plimp found a thermal, then, and tossed them high, high across a scarp in the diamond mountains, and Adriel's heart seemed to stop, for a moment, until with a bang it started again and her stomach jolted back into place, and she howled with the joyous laughter, the happy abandon, of a child.

It had to end, of course.

"Go down now," she instructed the plimp. The mass of skyweed had no ears, nor any means of hearing her. Somehow it seemed to detect her meaning. Air hissed as valves puckered and opened in a thousand small inflated bladders. The plimp lost buoyancy, dropped through the air, glided and then crunched like a great vegetable bat to an inelegant landing.

In the distance, matron caught up her skirts, struggling over the uncomfortable tumble of the stony ground toward her disobedient charge, a lock of grey hair come loose from her wimple. Even as the stout woman ran toward the patch of long grass where the plimp had set down, Adriel could see her head shaking from side to side in fond, unconvincing disapproval. "Naughty child!" Lady Molly's voice wheezed, with a touch of its own laughter. "Whatever will I do with you? Oh dear, oh dear. Whatever will your husband do with you?"

Adriel's heart seized in her chest. Not husband, not yet, but undeniably husband-to-be. She had put it out of her mind in a fever of forgetfulness, climbing on to the poisoned bubbles of the plimp, goading the creature into the sky. Her betrothed husband, son of the Director of Shrirampur. Son of that filthy beast with the unpronounceable name.

"I won't marry him," she cried out at the top of her strong young voice, and turned, all the beauty and exhilaration of the day and her wonderful ride gone, stolen, poisoned as surely as if the plimp's stinging toxins had entered her flesh. Adriel, whose loveliness was a cruel whip across her own sweet shoulders, ran into the open grassy field, away from Lady Molly and the puffing, lifting mass of skyweed, refusing to weep, refusing to give way to the wretched horror of her life.

"I'd rather be dead," she shouted, and only as the words came back to her ears did she realise that she meant them. "I'd rather be dead!"

Tell me it all. I am ravenous for the knowledge of it.

Ah, human! Remember, remember!

I was not there. How may I remember it?

You say you were not there? Very well, let it be so -- for now.

It is so, of necessity. And because I cannot remember, I ask you to tell me.

We shall show it to you. For we were there, through all of it, and it is not yet finished, so you must remember, human, remember!

Where were you, that you should have this knowledge?

We were everywhere watching, even when High Earth's Empire bloomed and faded and fell into ruin, the briefest summer flowers bright in the darkness of space.

It seemed to me -- For a moment, I thought I recalled that place. That dark space. Is it like the sea?

Like the sea, in its unfathomable deeps. Like a ploughed field, planted with wild blossoms.

And humans went into it? Humans sailed upon its vacuum, plucked its fragrances?

Of course. As they have sailed every sea, stolen every blossom.

Yet this... memory... does not seem altogether ugly to me.

There is a kind of beauty in it. A feral eagerness. From the morning glow of that time which afterward would be called the Bright Ages, starcraft gorged with Earth's children exploded outward from their first world like the seed of a ripe flower.

Yes. I remember. Like seed scattered in hope across all the fertile fields and barren places of the universe.

And like water poured into soil to bring those seeds bursting forth, time poured into space -- century upon century, an interval that must be numbered in the thousands and tens of thousands of years -- until your arrogant humankind had bridged the stars of this entire galaxy with bonds of commerce and allegiance.

A dream, then, of sorts.

Time and greed eat dreams.

You are evasive. It could not prevail?

Empire's entropy brought low that cruel, beautiful society, toppled its great towers into the bloodied dust of a million worlds. Think of it as noise and confusion. One might take three pots of new paint: one bright scarlet, another lemon-yellow, a third the blue of summer's sea.

One might, if one were human, as you are surely not.

One might then throw their contents into a bowl, and stir. That murky brown is the colour of ugliness, the colour of noise, the colour of entropy.

The colour of forgetfulness, it seems.

That very hue and tint. But your colour, I swear it, shall be the hue of memory.

Chakravalin lies on his back, chewing the end of a stem of something which is not quite grass. In star-sprayed darkness, in the Imperial garden's hush, he is another lean shadow merely. Eyes closed, he sucks sweet juice into his mouth, swallows it against the knot of bitter anger in his throat.

A kilometer distant, the Palace is very quiet, settling into sleep. All Chakravalin hears in the starry midnight dark are the furtive movements of small creatures foraging among fallen leaves, and the long swell of the river Kashi slapping against the breakwaters and the ghats, where once pilgrims gathered at the edge of the sacred waters.

The boy opens his eyes to the sky, and sobs.

Splashed in a blazing halo above his head are the stars humans once renounced, in exhaustion and dread, the stars which humankind has now to win back.

The ancient sign of the mythical first murderer, Kain, seems to Chakravalin to be burned into the human soul. It is the scarred brand of war and conquest and bloody murder. It drives warriors to doom, he tells himself, and to empire.

Chakravalin grinds knuckles into eye sockets until the pressure of it hurts, until phantom stars and streaks of red and purple light burst into his blocked vision. Those chill points of light shining above his head are his heritage as Hereditary Ministrator of Shrirampur, son of the man who is making himself -- step by brutal step, light-year by bloody light-year -- the new Imperial Director of the Galaxy.

Chakravalin sits up, gritting his teeth at his own baffled hurt. Squatting, he forces himself to inhale and exhale deeply for several minutes in the way he has been shown by his Naval warcraft instructor. Breath catches deep in his chest, shuddering. With confused anger, the boy gets to his feet, wanders blindly in the overpowering scent of the autumn trees to the edge of the wild garden. He follows a well-trodden track down to the shore.

An acrid odour fills his nostrils, drugs his mind. Under his bare feet, leaves and grasses rustle. He comes to an eroded ghat, its steps leading down to the edge of the lapping water. Cool waves lick his toes.

No moon shines. Rishipatana's principal sacred river, the Kashi, richly purple under this world's daylight, is utterly black in the night. Wide here as a small sea, it seems an ocean of oil, of tears. As Chakravalin watches, almost paralysed in his blocked anger, the bright stars of the local constellations sink with slow deliberation into the black boundary where river swallows sky: sink and drown in its great slow swell.

At length he throws off his light robe, leaving only his dhoti wrapped about his loins. The lure of the river is undeniable. Chakravalin walks slowly into the water. It strokes his skin with a cold shock, wetting his long hair. He stands for a moment murmuring a mantra, blessing himself with drops of water. Then he lets the current carry him drifting toward the stars falling so slowly into the invisible horizon -- like Core stars drifting to their doom into the Sing, the Great Black Hole at the centre of the galaxy.

The river's coldness wakens him from his dazed apathy. He snorts, spits out the stinging stuff which has entered his nostrils, licks from his lips water flavoured with strange minerals and salts.

With long, strong strokes, then, Chakravalin swims to the partially submerged breakwater. Generations of feet and waves have smoothed once-rough stone. His hands slip on lichen and river-weed. Clambering up from the water, he finds a dry place out of the Kashi's reach.

The night breeze, bringing goose-pimples to his exposed skin, makes the water seem warm by comparison. It clears his head. Above, as ever, the stars, too, are cold: impersonal, detached. There is no way to know, just by looking at them, that warriors (brave men and cowards, conscript and free alike, men of all but the lowest caste) are drowning in each another's blood out there for the right to own them.

Wars, and rumours of wars. In the days of Chakravalin's great-grandfather, in the previous century, the starships of Shrirampur's ambitious fleet fought like demons and won the southern Rim Stars. Now the same bruised, terrible craft press into the Centre, into the hot halo where the Kleth live behind the boundary of the extinct quasar which is the Great Black Core Hole, the Singularity, the Sing...

For a moment, Chakravalin finds himself smiling. If any group, any species, might rightly consider themselves masters of the galaxy, certainly it must be the Kleth. Beside that wise, ancient race, humankind has attained no more than its raw adolescence, and humanity's fallen Empire can hardly be of more significance than the lost sandcastle of a child, scoured back into the shoreline by the uncaring waves.

He shivers, and hugs his naked shoulders. It does not please him, he realises suddenly, to think of his own kind in this way.

"I'm a human," he mutters aloud. He lifts his head and stares at the sky littered with stars. More loudly, he repeats it, and it sounds somehow like a challenge, not a simple declaration. "I'm a human, hear me?"

Up there, out there, battleships are roaring in the silence of space, forcing their way star by star into territory where other rival monarchies and federations are being hammered into reality by men as desperate and strong as Chakravalin's father Jagannatha.

In the clusters and compact systems of the galactic Centre, where stars are strewn so close that night is almost bright as day, battles are waging at this very moment between Shrirampur and groups not quite as powerful, not yet.

The young man grinds his teeth together. If only Shrirampur might fully win the support of the Kleth, gain the impossible science and lore of that alien species. But the Kleth regard human ambition with wry amusement. Once, if they are to be believed, they owned the universe -- owned it, used it, and at last, tiring of the game, abandoned it. How incredible: to discard the universe, as an adult might cast aside a play-thing loved in childhood and now forgotten in the bustle of grown-up life...

No, that is wrong. The Kleth did not abandon the worlds and stars of the galaxy, any more than an adult casts aside a treasured toy from childhood. An image abruptly enters Chakravalin's mind, and a rush of emotion with it: a stuffed woolly elephant he once hugged to his chest each night, after his mother Parvati had died, weeping in his sleepless grief. The memory catches in his breast like something choking him. Where is Ganesha now? He hasn't seen the old toy for years. No doubt some Nanny found it, dusty under a couch or wet and mouldy from rain in a tree-house, and put it carefully aside. Or threw it into a convenient DisposAll. Poor Ganesha. Poor elephant god.

The Heir turns his gaze from the stars and looks back across the carefully wild Deer Garden to the palace. In the dark it is hard to make out the lovely stone tracery that is the Directory Palace on this pleasure world. Few lights show, for even with the Court retinue in attendance most of the hundreds of rooms are vacant.

He tries to turn away, tries not to look, but he can not stop himself. It hurts, hurts like the ache of a broken bone before the medical machine heals it, but he cannot turn his eyes away. The Supreme Authority's room is lightless, as he has expected. But her Serenity Adriel's windows glow with golden illumination.

The young man closes his eyes again, too late, and the lids burn with a pricking of angry tears. How he hates his father!

Violently, he shakes his head against the blocked emotion raging inside him. He casts himself from the rocky breakwater, strikes the water clumsily, lets himself slide into the uncaring river.

And hard light blossoms suddenly high overhead: blue as an electric spark, fierce and hot. The Kashi's flat waves catch the flare, splash light into runs and ripples gone as quickly as they've come. Chakravalin treads water, flicks back his wet hair, stares upward in shock. A distant roll of thunder peals across the sea. Without pause, then, something huge and blacker than the night hangs dreadfully above him, its edges flickering with scarlet running lights. Before he can flinch from the threat of its hanging mass it is gone, falling with awesome silence into the military landing field several kilometers west of the Palace.

"Warship!"

Chakravalin's skin seems for a moment too tight for his body. Mineral-salted, a wave finds him open-mouthed, makes him cough. A warship, coming straight in from orbit to the Palace! It is almost unheard of.

Some grief-stricken, self-hurting part of his attention notices that the light in Adriel's room has gone out. Other windows spark into brilliant life through the darkened sections of the Director's chambers.

With a shiver, the boy drives himself through the dark water. A chipped step at the edge of the ghat bruises his foot; he scarcely notices. Without a towel, he throws on his light clothes and runs, barefoot and dripping, toward the awakening Palace.