Manfred, who had embraced me on the surface, was in charge of the expedition. He brought me into their vehicle.

“You show no signs of reflection sickness, Agent Eleven.” He showed me my countenance in a round mirror with a brass rim, an item so familiar I almost smiled. “So you can tell your story in peace. In my experience, it’s better to get it down before the impressions fade.”

I stretched out my arms on the bench. “I’m a case officer. I am not trained to tell my story. On the contrary, my standing instruction is to reserve any information connected to my assignment.”

Manfred shrugged. He put his mirror away. “We work for the same organization. You are a thousand centuries out of your way. The rules don’t apply. Besides, somebody has gone to great lengths to put you here. Or that’s how it looks.”

“You’re saying I was deliberately left to molder in that grave?”

The rest of the team was bringing their equipment on board. Manfred didn’t immediately react to my question. Instead he said, “In my experience, everybody wants to tell his story. Everybody, in the end, wants his story to be told.”

In the end, I told it. I told Manfred about Shanumi Six and Keswyn Muller. Soledad in the Green Dolphin. The blue pill and the black pill. The elusiveness of the main enemy who had never been rightly identified. The disturbance at the Agency, just as we’d arrived in Marrakesh, which had stranded us in thin air. I even told Manfred about the librarians at the bottom of the archive of the past and the future, their bronze shoulders touching in the near darkness, who whispered to each other in unknown algorithms.

Why did I talk? I was a case officer but I was also a human being. I was a hundred thousand years from my point of origin. I was a hundred minutes out of the grave, my skin as scaly as a lizard. I had been brought back into the world and I had an overwhelming desire to talk about what I had seen. So I kept speaking while the rover ran high over the rough ground, pitted with the remains of farm dams and windmills, suspension bridges gleaming among their broken cables over dry riverbeds, motorways covered with silt and broken branches.

After I stopped from exhaustion, Manfred reached under the bench and found me a pair of binoculars. The sun was going down across the mountains, exiting a cloudless evening. The binoculars brought me to a corner near the moon where the constellations were obscured by myriad points of light. Shooting stars ran in a river to the horizon. I drew a breath, tried to understand what I was seeing.

“It’s quite a show. The last days of Earth. In this universe at any rate.”

I said, “I didn’t come out of the grave to listen to riddles, Manfred.”

“This is the first act of a new planetary bombardment, Enver. Rocks originating in the Kuiper Belt are descending to the surface. By the time the bombardment ceases, the Earth will be stripped of her crust. Lava on the surface. A Venus-like atmosphere for the first time in four billion years. Neither photosynthesis nor respiration.”

I couldn’t have described my feelings to hear Manfred’s confession if I had spent a lifetime on the virtual stage. I could hardly breathe, lying back on the bench until I was more in control of myself. “Everything we fought for, day to day, everything contained in the library of the past and the future, was about eliminating threats to our way of life. How could this happen?”

„We’re not prophets, Enver. Our ability to decipher the predictions is as limited today as it was in your time. You know why that is, the mathematics of permutations and combinations. The only way we could ever solve it would be to embrace the horror of calculating across many separate universes and splitting ourselves into many contradictory pieces. And that is contrary to our fundamental assumption.”

I must have done something to express my impatience at having the basic dogma explained to my face that caused Manfred to stop. He looked out at the surface, considering something as the rover ran along a collapsed road, the rounded husk of a solar power station passing on the right.

He went on after a minute, taking a different tack. “Then there’s the question of relative causes. Out in the Kuiper Belt, it doesn’t take much to send a cascade of rocks in one direction or another.”

“So you believe this is a coincidence? First a supernova. Then, a fraction of an instant later in cosmic terms, a planetary bombardment. You would be more likely to win the continental lottery a hundred times in a row.”

Manfred flipped a series of switches on the side of the rover and, along with the two members of his team, started to remove his gloves and overalls. “Maybe a conspiracy against the Earth exists. But I cannot prove it, my friend. I cannot put a name and a face to whatever is stirring among the rocks and stones of the Kuiper Belt, let alone what power could alter the heart of a star. In your time, the Agency suspected that there were too many coincidences against us. But they were unable to prove the existence of the main enemy. More than that, I do not wish to say at present.”

The rover entered a tunnel. Bars of light passed above us, decelerating as we descended into the station.

In the bay there were no other vehicles. A tracked machine descended from a pulley in the roof and approached. It assessed the outside of the rover, a single black eye turning to consider the damage. Its probes and antennae looked as finely worked as those of an insect.

Everybody showered in a long red room on the side of the bay. I was uncomfortable for a minute and then forgot myself in the ecstasy of very hot water and steam. The others took their leave. Manfred waited and found me a gown. He put his arm around my shoulders for a minute.

“I am curious, Eleven. Before the Morocco expedition, how much did you know about your future Six?»

“I knew Shanumi’s reputation as a case officer, which was why I was glad we were assigned to each other.”

“Her reputation?”

I hesitated, noticing myself in the mirror set above the sink, a man who had been left to moulder. My spider sense was tingling. “Not just the highlights, I mean. Not just the glory, not just the courage of a true daughter of the continent. She had a very refined side. She was on good terms, for example, with the painters and composers of the Edo period in Japan.”

“You call it glory. Birmingham, Alabama, with Martin Luther King.” Manfred counted on his fingers. “Leningrad. Stalingrad. Birkenau. The Second Congolese War. Negative highlights. Negative infinities. Some might say that your Six had an affinity for terror.”

I didn’t reply at once to Manfred’s accusation. For it came to me that I was so far from home, my replies could be deemed to have archeological significance. I should watch my words, especially when it came to Shanumi Six. I knew there was something in the case I didn’t comprehend.

Manfred led me to an elevator. It descended into an endless shaft, down and further down into the Earth. I lost track of how long it took amid the acceleration. Information flickered on the walls.

I turned to my companion. “If you’re asking me to interpret for Shanumi Six, I can only do so to a limited degree.”

“I’m listening.”

“She admired periods of great imagination and productivity. They just happened to go together with social upheaval, what you mean by terror. She liked to quote from somewhere, about a peaceful country like Switzerland taking five hundred years to invent the cuckoo clock.”

For the moment Manfred seemed to be satisfied with my answer. At any rate, the doors opened, releasing us into the depths of the planet. To my surprise, our destination was as light as a starship: greenhouses in huge globes and bronze refrigeration chambers connected by winding walkways which disappeared into space. The air was crisp. There were no machines, no computer consultants in sight.

Manfred brought me to a suite of rooms adjoining the central corridor. In the first room was a table with a chessboard, the spectral pieces arranged in midgame three inches in the air. No chairs or sign of an opponent.

Floating along the high wall were shelves housing my host’s collection of objects. He left me to examine them for a few minutes. There was no evident rhyme or reason behind the selection: soapstone statues of gods and goddesses on lily pads sat next to black-ink vases with pictures of garlanded bulls on their sides and amber drops containing prehistoric insects. Then there was a series of seashells mounted under a lens. I thought of the ocean starting to boil and forced myself to remember days on the seaside with my father, hot sand and salty water.

In the next room there were ornate couches on gold feet and oil paintings on the walls. I sat opposite Manfred. He brought up recordings of burnt libraries and data centers. The debris of a long-ruined civilization.

“There’s the apparent reason you were buried so long. Somebody burrowed into the Agency and obliterated the filing system. They couldn’t locate their own case officers and bring them back into the fold. And it was your friend, Keswyn Muller, that minor figure from a discredited continent, who seems to have been the guilty party. Who happens to have been the target of your first approach in the field.” Manfred sat back and examined me, his face flickering as the causeless images of death and destruction continued in the air between us. “I would like to know your assessment of that constellation of facts. One case officer to another.”

I said, “I have no assessment. I am too implicated in the facts to see them objectively.”

“You are implicated, Eleven. Somebody sent you out of the way and, by gum, we are going to put you right back in the middle of it and you are going to evaluate the situation like a good case officer.”

The images faded in the space between us.

“Do you plan to send me back a thousand centuries? That would cost more than a national energy budget.”

“We have a power station on Jupiter. I am familiar with your personnel file, which happens to have been preserved. I hope you can conquer your fear of heights.”

My hours in Marrakesh, not to say the days which followed my time with Manfred, ran so hot with the fever of conspiracy and intrigue that I remember the four days at the bottom of the shaft as a holiday.

I was left to myself. The members of the archeological team were busy on the surface, returning only to log their finds and replenish their supplies. I was never invited to join them at a meal, although occasionally Manfred would come down and share a bowl of blue-green coffee, looking into the algal grounds in the bottom of his cup as if they had some secret to reveal to a dedicated officer. He didn’t tell me anything more about himself or his collaborators, but on more than one occasion he inquired further into the phenomenon of Shanumi Six.

“You trained with her for three months? You didn’t fall in love with her. I find it difficult to understand.”

When Manfred talked, he cupped a hand over his mouth, picking meditatively at his mustache. It made me think he was deciding how much it was advisable to reveal.

“What’s difficult about it? One case officer learning the tricks of a trade from another, as you would say.”

“No, it’s interesting. It’s interesting to me. In our context, very few deaths mean there are very few births on the other end. An education is a different process. No enemies and friends. No teachers and pupils in a neurochemical tank. No affairs of the passions.”

I cautioned myself, not for the first time, that a good case officer let the other person pour out the contents of his heart. So I waited for Manfred.

Eventually, he continued. “We do not live one on top of the other anymore. On the contrary. No cities. No companies. No parliaments. We are strung out across the solar system. The Earth is no longer the focus of our activity as a species. Nor do we focus on one another as you did. For somebody to have a moon to himself is not unheard of—if that is his heart’s desire.»

I said, “It sounds like a lonely existence.”

“Well, that is all I know. I can’t say if it is lonely or not. To be honest, despite this line of work, there is nothing less interesting than the human mind in all its glory.”

It was as close to an explanation that Manfred gave as to why we would never be friendly with each other. I had arrived in a century without the burden of friendship, and there were advantages. It meant there were no consultants to placate. No charts in probability script to decipher. No enemies and no allies. Only the silence to welcome me when I woke up and the even sunshine spreading throughout the facility from no discernible source.

In the meantime, I set about recovering my strength. I swam in the Olympic-sized pool in a deserted gymnasium, one lap after another to the point of exhaustion. Chlorine and the taste of chalk in the recycled air. From the full-length mirrors on the gym walls, my reflection gazed reassuringly into my eyes. I was skin and bones, but I wasn’t a skeleton.

I was delighted to be alive again. At the same time, I yearned to be out on the surface and see the sky, whatever it contained. I sat in the steam room for hours, pouring water on the charcoal brazier, until my skin stung with the heat. The reek of the graveyard which had lodged in me vanished, although it came back sooner or later.

On the launchpad, noticing my anxiety and, I assume, wanting to distract me, Manfred returned to the technical aspects of our journey.

“We need a significant chunk of hydrogen gas to allow you to return.”

“How big are we talking?”

“Jupiter will not be quite the same. Time displacement, as you know, is the most expensive activity in the history of economic investment. It has almost denuded the solar system.”

The rockets underneath us began to whine. We kept a moment of silence and then strapped in. I looked at myself in the mirror Manfred provided and repeated the words of the Founder under my breath, old-fashioned precautions.

I examined the inside of the shuttle. Benches were arranged along its length. Gauges and terminals were built into the bulkhead, although there was no cockpit. No overhead lights, only a red pulse running in a spiral from the floor to the ceiling. It wasn’t the technology of the Interplanetary Service.

“Who are you, Manfred?”

“You know my name and class. I see no need to complicate your life and my life further by going into explanations.”

“Who are you really, though? I’m not asking for prohibited knowledge. But I would like to have an idea about the meaning of all this. Are you even human?”

My companion didn’t reply. He looked impatient, as I might have been had the roles been reversed. The windows of the shuttle went dark as steam rolled up the fuselage. We were off the ground without knowing it, steadying to an angle in midair.

In the darkened cabin, I thought that Manfred’s eyes were glowing. I considered the possibility that my revival had been staged and that I was in the hands of the main enemy. That they’d pretended to come out of the far future, pretended to be in the employment of the Agency. That I couldn’t trust my eyes. That Manfred, whoever he was, had tricked me into revealing my secrets.

By the time the windows were clear, we were ten miles up. I could see the swirls of cloud forming in the atmosphere. The mountains and the ocean were as peaceful up here as they had been a hundred thousand years ago: the stone crown of the continent encircled by mysterious green water. There was no sign of the bombardment under way. The poles were still covered with spidery fingers of ice, a marble shimmering in the middle of the cosmos that we had come across by accident. I could trust in the majesty of the scene, which could not have been staged—even if, by design, I could not understand the man who sat across from me on the top floor of the rocket.

My paranoia settled as I recalled the spirit of the doctrines which guided Manfred as much as myself. It was easy to forget how close we as a species had come to extinction. On the day of the supernova, despite the warning delivered by the wife of S Natanson, a small fraction of the population had made it to the safety of the mines. Decades later, a fraction of a fraction had returned to the surface. It had been the Agency’s task to ensure that the catastrophe never recurred. Never again.

Yet the Earth was empty again. Manfred unbuckled and stood up straight. He stretched his arms and legs, bent down to let me out.

“We are nothing but your descendants, Eleven, acting in accordance with the doctrines of S Natanson to preserve the thread of civilization. To prevent the abomination of a multiverse taking hold.”

I got up as well. Outside, the maintenance robots were clambering along the girders of the ship, green-and-red lights blinking on their torsos.

“That’s your story?”

“I have no reason to deceive you, Sleeping Beauty. I’m no restrictionist. I believe in a free exchange of ideas between time periods, to the extent that it’s possible. I brought you in.”

“I can’t have been the only one to get lost.”

“There, you are correct. The lucky ones managed to come in from the cold a long time ago. Some despaired, took the black pill.”

In the year of our Lord 10^5, it still took three days to get to Jupiter. The stately planet approached through the portholes as slowly as if we were on a ship.

Above and below us a dozen miniature rockets were firing as the shuttle changed direction. Through the porthole, we saw the sun—pale as a ghost in its corona. Galaxies surrounded us, tapestries of light in every direction. I quelled my fear of heights for the moment, although I occasionally wanted to cry.

It took until the third day for Manfred to put his sketch of the situation in front of me. It consisted of a series of figures on the top. Along the bottom, he had printed shapes and dotted lines: possibility and probability characters. I turned it around and couldn’t make sense of a single statement. My cheeks burnt.

“Your story strikes me as a riddle. That interests me so much that I have portrayed it there in the form of a possibility diagram. What did you know about Marrakesh?”

“Look, I wasn’t a specialist by any means. I wouldn’t dare to call myself a Moroccanologist. I read the case folder.”

Manfred went around closing the shutters so that we could sleep. The shuttle became an unexpectedly cozy chamber, soft green lights around the circumference. My companion rolled out the beds and put the sheets on them, running them up to the corner with a hand. He gave me the pillows from a closet behind the bulkhead and went on with his roundabout enquiry.

“Morocco was the first time you encountered the people who used to rule the Earth. When you could fall into the clutches of people who enslaved people like you and me. How did your Six prepare you?”

“Shanumi watched Gone with the Wind, told me not to worry about people staring. She said that real actors, twentieth-century actors, were better than the greatest acting algorithms from our time, an argument that makes no sense. Also, she advised me to keep my natural skin. To stick to the itinerary in Marrakesh.”

I saw Manfred was becoming impatient. He sat on the side of the bed and brought up a hologram. It had been taken through a small window and looked onto the table where I had been sitting, a hundred thousand years ago, with two companions. Despite the grainy black-and-white image, I could make out that the woman was wearing earrings.

“Did she warn you, in any way, about Keswyn Muller?”

“Obviously Muller was under observation so there was some element of suspicion. But there was nothing to suggest that he could be a danger to us, let alone to the Agency. In the recordings he was standing harmlessly in a window. I knew he had been involved with antiquities. What are you trying to get at?”

Manfred ignored my question. “Lastly, Eleven, were you given any kind of instruction regarding Muller’s companion?”

“Not that I remember. No.”

“So who wanted you out of the way? This is a riddle I cannot solve. And, like you, I have never enjoyed the existence of a riddle.”

Manfred stood up, as if I had done something to anger him, and went over to the last open porthole on the other side of the bay. The one that looked in the direction of invisible Earth, back to the thousand-year dominion of the Agency, a thousand centuries in the past. The porthole that looked back to a past when there had been seven continents and seven thousand cultures. I expected Manfred to say something, to take it all in and put it in front of me, but instead he closed the final shutter.

I stretched out on the bed and thought about going to sleep.

I must have slept for twelve hours. When I woke up, Jupiter was the only thing I could see. It produced ribbons of brown-and-white gas along its breadth, and was surrounded by a bracelet of dim moons. It was immense. I couldn’t look away. The red eye, a whirlpool rotating beneath our position, examined the spacecraft without pity.

Manfred was studying data on his screen.

“You should put on a suit. You can find one in the topmost locker.”

I obeyed. I had never been in vacuum, but I had been trained to use any kind of protective gear. The basic design of a spacesuit hadn’t changed: atmospheric recycler and rebreather, microwave furnace, jets and tools, and the unearthly silver-white skin which space walkers have flaunted since the Apollo launches.

I adjusted the waist and pulled on the upper portion of the suit. It adapted to my form, the fabric sealing in front of my eyes. I checked the status of the various systems. They were in good order.

The station swam up. The central compartment was the size of an oil tanker, minute against the flaring red surface of the planet, blocks of machinery moving along the bulkhead. On the underside was the scoop. The funnel was a few hundred yards across. The metal was already glowing red in the cold above the planet.

Manfred showed me another schematic which I didn’t understand. He adjusted the collar of the spacesuit for me, tapped me on the side.

“The energy required for your return is enormous. We are pushing the entire manifold of space and time back to its next most probable state. The process is so demanding that it is destabilizing the chain of assets.”

“You said there was no technical problem.”

“No technical problem, but something may catch fire.”

Manfred put the helmet on my head. For a moment I was inside the atmosphere of the suit, the oxygen saccharine on my tongue, the electronic display painted before my eyes in bar graphs. I wished them away.

Manfred walked around me, snapping on the various hinges, and pressing on them to make sure. Lights came on inside as it assessed the situation. Temperature. Pressure. Orientation. Gravity and mock gravity.

“Who are you really, Manfred?”

He put his hand on my back and steered me in the direction of the airlock.

“However much we reject restrictionism as an inhuman code, it suits us to limit the transfer of superfluous knowledge. Above all, mark my words, it rescues us from the burden of the infinite. The infinite is the only thing that a human being may not survive. That is what lies behind our hatred of the multiverse and repugnant causal loops.”

“I won’t ask anymore questions.”

“Good luck. Godspeed. In the best of times, in the worst of times, may the hour of your blessedness arrive.”

“And may it arrive for you also.”

He stepped back to let me enter the airlock. The alarm sounded. I went in and sealed the helmet. The identification markers came up. The bronze tint inside the visor faded, to be replaced by supernatural clarity. The gauges and indicators shrank, removed themselves to the side. The door closed behind me.

Manfred gestured through the porthole. He connected to the suit, his voice rasping on the line.

“You can think of me, Eleven, as the last of the case officers. A loyal son of the continent. I did my duty until the end. Remember me.”

“I will.”

“When the time is right, tell my story.”

Jupiter occupied the entire horizon. I thought I was dreaming to see its breadth below me: the slow spiral of brown-red gas and a thousand shards of lightning wherever you happened to look on the vaporous bulk of it. Everything on the surface was in slow motion—cloud or condensing rain. Silent majesty. I wanted to plummet into its great red whirlpool and vanish forever. At that moment I remembered, for some reason, that a seashell was the icon of the Interplanetary Service.

The thruster gave a final push, sending me turning head over heels until I collided with the airlock. I held on, desperately straining against my momentum which wanted to take me back out. The external door opened. I hauled myself in, and entered the station.

It was a brightly lit room in which I found myself, steel cupboards along the walls. The temperature was high. There was too much oxygen, as my instruments informed me. Rivers of sparks were flowing into the room, following the burnt underside of the roof, jumping here and there through the air. Somewhere in the depths of the station, heavy machinery was moving into position.

I kept my visor down, breathing inside the suit, sweating in torrents, and ran into the corridor. The temperature got hotter as I came nearer to the hub. The lights began to go out, faltering in the glow of the sparks. The map directed me to a room on the right, crammed to the top with cabling, and through a hall occupied by holographic statues of men and women, phosphorescent green and twenty feet tall.

The next room I went into was filled with drones. They were held in racks, insect eyes gleaming ever so slightly as I went by. Flame was working at them from above, causing their casings to melt. They didn’t seem to notice the situation. I cursed them. At the same time, I saw the fire reach down and catch hold of my suit. I watched without believing my eyes as the torso began to scorch. A haze of sparks rose around my head. No pain at first, but I knew that my skin was burning underneath the suit.

I stripped, beating down the fire as best I could. I kept the helmet on, trying to follow the map to the center. After a minute it brought me to a long hallway, very dark and very hot, sheets of purple flame forming above me. There was no sign of whether the other end was passable. The viperish crackle of the fire came from every direction.

I thought about going to sleep right there and then, removing the helmet, putting my head down on the grill, and letting the wound burn me into unconsciousness. Instead, I found myself running through the curtain of fire, burning my hands and shoulders. Someone nearby was screaming.

At the end of the corridor, a pair of doors opened at my approach. It let me into a vast chamber. Drones were crawling along the walls, trying to control the fire. Some sprayed foam, while others on the ceiling were removing and extinguishing burning panels. One of them dropped in front of me. It had a long neck on top of its smoldering body and many eyes arranged around its head.

“You have been severely injured. Allow me to remove your helmet.”

I took off the helmet myself and dropped it on the floor, putting my hand on the drone to support myself. I couldn’t feel my arms. The ash was bitter inside my mouth.

The drone opened its side and produced a tray holding a capsule and injector.

“I would now like to administer a sedative and an antibiotic to the exposed area. If you would record your consent, we can proceed directly to treatment.”

I said, “If you delay me, nothing will be saved. Everything—everything—will be lost.”

The drone whirred and turned its head to the side, one eye after the other coming into focus. “In that case, will you kindly step this way?”

I couldn’t stand upright. “Help me get there.”

Another drone entered the room and stopped at my side. Between the two of them they managed to take me to the other side of the hall. The roof rose into a tower, thousands of feet tall, where I could see drones engulfed by the acrid purple fire. Many were starting to lose their footing in the heat. Several husks were already burning beneath them on the floor. Smoke was rising from underneath our feet.

On the side of the chamber was the arch. The aperture was shimmering, the famous horseshoe which had been our symbol across a thousand years. The drones brought me up the steps to the railing. I managed to stand on my own feet. Despite my burning skin, I felt that flicker of excitement every traveller lives for.

To my surprise, a number of drones had arranged themselves in a column in front of the arch. I walked through them, wondering what they were doing. They raised their heads at the same time, the same turquoise gleam running through their many eyes.

My life, I thought, had been a dream intent on bringing me to this point.

“We wish you good fortune, Agent Eleven, on your mission. And Godspeed on your way.”

“Thank you. Thank you for your valuable assistance.”

Above us the roof was melting, caving inwards. A tide of flame swept through the chamber, burning the oxygen out of the air. The remaining machines had given up the fight and were allowing themselves to fall to the floor. They seemed to be watching me as I hesitated.

Sections of girders and massive hunks of iron plummeted from above, falling under artificial gravity. In ninety seconds the surface of the station would disintegrate and the vacuum would come rushing in.

I prepared to hold my breath. I must have lost consciousness because when I opened my eyes again I was on the floor of a vast hall, rolled into a ball. I was listening to somebody screaming with all their might. I passed out again.

The sensations dear to my heart: the scent of cinnamon and hospital custard. The tang of safe tobacco. I was home in a cocoon, the blanket close around my shoulders. I considered a trip to the Mozambique islands, finding a current in the warm water to take me far into the distance. I would take my father and sister along.

I smiled and turned to the side when I realized that my hands were tied to the bed. I sat up, trying to pull them through the knots which got tighter, the cord cutting into my wrist. When I gave up and relaxed my arms, it also relaxed. After a minute, it returned to its original length.

I took stock of my surroundings, telling myself not to panic, although I was already hot from fear. I was in a narrow hospital room. It was empty apart from the bed and the monitor, a door with a panel of frosted glass set into the top. My head was fully bandaged.

On the far side of the room was an unbarred window. I was on the fiftieth or sixtieth floor, looking onto Lagos Memorial Plaza. Mile-high office buildings alternated with row houses and automatic brothels, the pattern of development in the center of Johannesburg after the hard years in the mines. Advertising balloons moved between the buildings to announce men’s colognes and high-heeled shoes, skin-darkening creams, platinum jewelry, and valet robots in seersucker suits. I thought I could make out, in the distance, the solar rays on the great monument to the Day of the Dead. And yet there was something unfamiliar to me in the panorama.

The hospital bed observed my activity: “Now that the risk of necrosis has passed, it was decided to allow you to wake up.” It must have seen something underneath the bandages. “Try not to scratch anywhere. I will prescribe something for the discomfort, emotional as well as physical.”

“I’m chained here.”

The bed was even-tempered. “Enver Eleven, you are detained under the provisions of the Fourteenth Statute concerning treason. Do not be unduly distressed. Your constitutional rights will be respected to the degree that is humanly possible.”

Saying this, the bed released a blue-green gas into my face which lowered me rapidly back into sleep. When I woke again I knew that I had been sedated. I couldn’t stop laughing from the giddiness. I woke and slept, woke and slept, adrift on an ocean of wild joy and silent suspicion. Once a day the medical cart entered to change my bandages and paint my face with new skin. It gave me the feeling of being rubbed with electricity.

I was fed with tubes and cleaned with tubes. Blood was taken, more tiny glass ampoules which were then filed on a rack in the refrigerator.

I watched the tubes accumulate from the bed, trying to ignore the tingling in my cheeks and the fear that I had been replaced body and soul. The heavy sedation did its work, lifting my spirits—although I knew my state of mind was artificial and that a charge of treason stood over my head.

The sounds of trucks and airplanes drew my attention to the outside world: infinite Johannesburg. I remembered its glitter through the haze of the sedative gas. Its automated merchant banks and holographic channels starring digital actors and albinos. Its crowds into which, already a spy as a child, I had loved to disappear as if into a gleaming black flood that would bear me away with it. Its prophets of truest optimism and pessimism. Its fortune-tellers in white robes who gleaned the future in a drained cup of hibiscus tea, seeing no sign of a cloud on the horizon. Dressed from head to toe in hair, its Yoruba preachers on the other hand who prophesied a second supernova.

I could tell them they would get what they wanted in the end: a sky full of fatal stars.

My condition deteriorated each time the bed sprayed gas into my face. I was alternately sure that I had fallen into the hands of the main enemy and that the Agency had put me on trial. I found myself trying to carry out a conversation with the cart, summoning it to ask trivial questions while my mind wandered through the centuries. I reached to my face when the bandages came off and found tears I didn’t remember shedding. I cried and laughed, argued, and cried again. In short, I was losing my mind.

When a man came into the room, I hardly believed in his existence.

“Do you even know what day of the week it is, Agent Eleven?»

I thought for a minute, sitting up in a corner of the bed, and feeling as if he were shining torchlight into my face. I wasn’t used to the fierceness of the human gaze. The bed and the medical cart were much more neutral; they expected less in the way of response.

“It must have been three months since Marrakesh.” I was not familiar with the sound of my own voice either. “Three months at least, I’d say.”

“You’ve been here a fortnight. One Friday to the next. Today is Friday again.”

I said, “That’s impossible.»

The man came to the side of the bed. He had a face like an axe. He was joined by a young woman.

“Lucan Thirteen. This is Deputy Inspector Akiko Thirteen. I have asked her to join us for the sake of legal validity. We work for Internal Section.”

“You’re Agency? Officially Agency?”

“Effectively so. A sealed organization within the organization, principle of tradecraft.” Lucan gave me a prime number which I knew from training, proof of his good standing in the halls of the Agency, and took out a small mirror in which I could examine my reflection. Despite the gesture of respect, he seemed angry with me, and looked tired enough to fall over. “As for the impossible, we deal with the impossible each and every day. We have been called in to deal with a situation in which a senior agent has been lost in the field.”

The hold of the sedation gas made it difficult to express anger but I still had logic at my disposal. “Just to remind you that you lost two agents. You left me out there in the cold. I was burnt to the bone. Now you have me in custody on a treason charge, as my bed informs me. I must say that something is askew.”

Lucan went on with his prepared statement. “As a matter of protocol, Agent Eleven, I would like to prepare the room for legal validity. At this time, for fear of mental degradation, I am not planning to use any form of neural coercion to ensure your compliance.”

“Go ahead. I am looking forward to having my story on record. Somebody is going to pay.”

I tried to make myself comfortable despite the restraints on my arms. It was starting to rain outside. The day was overcast, banks of cloud pressing in for miles. Lucan brought in two chairs from the corridor and placed them at the foot of the bed. He smiled, for the first time, although it was intended for the deputy inspector.

The young woman, Akiko, produced a short tripod from her briefcase. She turned a dial on the tripod, activating its large red eye which scrutinized the room. I knew something was wrong as soon as she began to speak. There was a vibration in her voice which didn’t make sense, made my whiskers tremble.

And yet she was perfectly professional, not even unfriendly. “I’ll let this run through. I am aware that field agents like yourself have little patience for such niceties. But, as we say, the Constitution protects every legal person on the continent, rich or poor, man and machine alike. Albino and black man.”

“Albino and black man.”

Were the ritual words even true? Did we mean them? They were second nature when you repeated them to a tripod at every significant juncture of your life, as I had done when entering the Agency and again when, to my surprise, I successfully completed the psychological battery.

For the first time, I questioned whether an albino, hated and feared on account of her pelt and lidless eyes, could expect equal justice. We simply used their names to prove the worth of our Constitution. I couldn’t say why Lucan and Akiko’s arrival had brought such ugly thoughts into my mind. Maybe it was simply that I had been around albinos and drunk beer with them like ordinary human beings.

At the end of its cycle, the tripod flashed and went silent, ready to listen. My guests sat down. Akiko looked up and down from her screen while Lucan began.

“Inform us, from your perspective, about the events in Marrakesh and thereafter.”

“At what level of detail? Do you want the facts? Do you want my suspicions on record?”

Lucan put his hands on the railing of the bed. His eyes were flat and blue, splinters of a broken bottle. “Everything. We have suffered the most serious reversal in the Agency’s recorded history, past and future. Our time capsules were nullified by Dr. Muller, who you were supposed to have under observation. We lost Shanumi Six, one of the foremost agents of her time or any time. We thought we lost you until someone close to the restricted centuries sent you home. So, anything and everything you remember.”

Lucan allowed me to go straight through, from Morocco to the end of time. He and Akiko Thirteen were polite, listened without comment to what I said about Manfred, and the drones on Jupiter Station, what I recalled about the warehouses, the vans of soldiers, the boys in white caps carrying flasks of tea along the road, the rolls of carpet stacked in the back of the shops, and the jeweler at his desk who kept an eye on my comings and goings. I explained about the hotel boy who had helped me get ahold of a spade, the narrow road which led to the Protestant graveyard, the cat which had been trying to find a way down when I lost consciousness. I tried to conjure the broken landscape under bombardment, the team of archeologists who’d pulled me out of the ground. I didn’t hold back anything.

Despite my intuitions, I didn’t try to be a case officer because I was too powerless in that situation. I thought it was my strange destiny to go from one century to the next and tell stories.

When I was finished, Lucan Thirteen stood at the window, reviewing the material as lightning crackled and smoked on the horizon. He consulted with Akiko in the doorway. I could hear that they were arguing, although I couldn’t tell about what. Then Lucan came back in and finalized the recording on the tripod. He didn’t offer to show me the results.

Nevertheless, I was relieved to have told my story. I had done my duty to Shanumi Six and to Manfred. I had told their stories as best as I was able.

Lucan put his hand on my shoulder. “I can tell you, informally, that you are unlikely to face a counterintelligence investigation. According to the consultants, who have reviewed your tripodal testimony, you believe that you are telling the truth. Of course, you could be programmed to believe that. Plus, there are grave questions to be considered: Why did the beacon break down? How did the events on the recording and the actual mission come to differ? Why did it happen at almost the same time as the intrusion into the library of the past and the future? The consultants will not be satisfied until they have obtained answers.”

“And until then?”

“Until then, how shall we put it, you are a member of our penal battalion, if you remember your twentieth-century history.”

I knew my history: the penal battalions had been placed in the front lines of the Red Army. If they retreated an inch they were cut down with machine guns by their own side.

It took another hour to obtain judicial authorization to release me from the bed. In the same minute, the bracelet on my wrist parted. I tested my arm, unable to believe that I could move it. I stood up and almost fell over. My legs buckled under me. Stars floated in front of my eyes. Akiko helped me back onto the bed. I didn’t want her to touch me and yet I wanted her to touch me.

I asked, “Did I do anything to deserve this?”

Lucan ran his hand along my neck, up to my head, as if he were taking a firm hold of me. “Muller used a particular eight-hundred-digit prime number to enter our system at a high level. The factors of that number would take longer than the lifetime of the universe to calculate. It was known only to the members of the Morocco group. Therefore, you or Shanumi Six. Take your pick. And be thankful I haven’t given permission for the consultants to use neural compulsion. Yet.”

“But if you’d used it already, I wouldn’t necessarily know.”

“That is also correct.”

It seemed like another kind of dream to be walking on a street, free of the hospital. The buildings extended to the horizon. Automatic trucks and trolleys rolled past, almost without a sound, while holograms on the station plaza published visions of space stations and supermodels, Antarctic holidays, hair extensions, kora concerts.

I couldn’t move an inch without a machine befriending me by name, congratulating me on my return, asking after my health, and offering me vouchers and discounts on colonial furniture, exciting opportunities, adventures in the new settlements for loyal sons of the continent, and other glimpses of happiness. They didn’t accost Lucan.

“They don’t notice you,” I said to him.

“Internal Section has police privileges. We have freedom from commerce. Strictly no solicitation.”

On the road I could feel life around me, living faces which were going to work and coming home, people of my own century who were on their way to meet friends and robots, making plans and breaking them on their gold-paneled telephones.

Around me, not so far from Rosebank, were the individuals I cared about, my sister’s children and my friends from before the Agency. In theory, I could have contacted them, talked about weather or soccer, listened to their voices, seen their familiar expressions in the air. They didn’t know that I had been gone, had laid in a grave until the verge of the restricted era, and had been burnt nearly to the bone. In practice, though, I was in the custody of Internal Section and they controlled my rights of connection.

“Anything you need?”

Lucan pointed at a shopping arcade. Hundreds of shops, outlined with lights and inhabited by holograms, went from ground level up into the sky. You could see assistants moving inside them. One of the sales machines, unoccupied for the moment, was staring out in our direction. Its boredom and longing were disconcertingly human. I thought about asking to buy a cup of espresso, pitch-black as a supermodel. Then I shook my head.

“You’re taking me to another prison?»

Lucan put his hand on my elbow. “Until this matter is resolved, you can’t speak to anyone, apart from atomic family, and obviously even that under supervision. But I’d like you to see your home and family.”

I travelled light. It was a side effect of the profession. Besides, I didn’t want to take Lucan to my dreary room in the basement, between a robot-operated launderette and a dim sum cafeteria. I was sure they had already been through my possessions. Every particle, every message and transaction originating from my name, would have been scanned into the archive.

“Are you offering to let me see my father?”

“He’s your last remaining relative, isn’t he? Didn’t you lose your sister last year?”

Lucan summoned an automatic limousine, long, black, and gleaming like the ZiLs you might have seen at the Kremlin. In the back it had two rows of facing leather benches.

I sat down behind the tinted windows. Lucan sat opposite me and placed his hands on the roof, just for a moment, as if to test its strength. I saw he had on a wedding ring. Akiko was in the very back, hunched over her screen, the top of her head visible above the seat. I couldn’t tell who these people were, but I knew they wanted something from me and that what they wanted was impermissible.

The car nosed into the road and sped into the left lane when there was an opening. The skyscrapers gave way to Chinatown, red lanterns outside the restaurants, the fireworks bazaar, and fish markets with their growth tanks open on the street, their unmistakeable smell of catfish and wet paper.

Then Little Lagos, witchcraft salons and wig factories, followed by train stations and warehouses, machine works, schoolyards, and apartment blocks. Recycling plants, connected by webs of super-cooled wire, set one next to the other.

Beyond were the camps for refugees from the drowned continents, laundry hung on the cement walls. They were supposed to be superstitious about robots, despite the best efforts of the government. They spoke in a language of their own, which they believed was unintelligible to machinery and machine translation. They gambled, fought, made useless political protests on the broadcast channels. Brought up their pale children to be pickpockets and hologram actors.

Twenty miles out, the first stretch of countryside became visible: farmland subtended by irrigation pipes, solar collectors dreaming in the sunshine, and dams filled to the brim with sparkling green water. Starlings and sandpipers, regiments of sacred ibis patrolling the embankment, stabbing the ground here and there. Unattended tractors moved on the land. Not a person to be seen. I remembered it was late spring. Other people, in other lives, on other timelines, were preparing for the holidays, packing for their beach houses.

Lucan darkened the windows. “We have special requirements, Agent Eleven. These limousines provide a higher level of safety. Underneath it all I am the same as you, a humble case officer.”

“I don’t know what it means to say we are the same.”

He changed the subject. “If it were up to me, I would prefer to drive myself. That’s what I do on holiday, drive to and from the coast, eight hours each way. By myself on the open road. In my opinion, we’ve handed too much of our lives to machines.”

Something in Lucan’s voice distressed me. I had tears in my eyes again. Maybe the effects of the sedation had worn off and I was working through the horrors of the past fortnight.

“What do you think I care? I was in a graveyard for centuries. No matter how much I brush, I can’t get the taste out of my mouth.”

Lucan put his hands on his thighs and sat up. “Let’s get this over and done with. This is your father’s most recent place of residence, I believe. The Abacha Reef Home for loyal sons and daughters of the continent. Akiko, you stay behind and plan for Enver’s training cycle.”

In the course of an entire life, my father had slept alone for a grand total of eleven nights. As a young man, he had been sent away to technical school in the mountains. The teachers indulged his passion for tinkering, allowing him free license with the woodworking and electronics carts.

During his bachelor years, he’d resided in a barracks for construction specialists, building silos and rocket pads for the Interplanetary Service. He met my mother on a very hot spring evening at a get-together for young Anglophiles and others nostalgic for the old world who were bringing back the game of bridge, scones and cream, bowls tournaments, and Edwardian architecture—although they conveniently forgot what would have happened to them there.

My father and mother were married inside of a month, never separated for a night. They rented a corner apartment on the seventieth floor of a building adjacent to the river, near an old observatory, where, with the appropriate licenses, they were allowed to raise children.

The place had rows of windows on two sides. I had many memories of looking out over the Service gantries and launchpads, watching the thin rockets go silently into the sky, one after the other at the peak times, each standing on a pillar of white smoke. They reached a certain height, balanced there for half a minute, then shot upwards and disappeared.

When my mother died unexpectedly, my sister and I were away from home. My father closed the shutters so that there was no difference between day and night. He refused any attempt at communication. If we tried to visit he fenced with us over the intercom. When the police forced their way into the apartment, he met them with a barrage of constitutional objections, filed with the automatic court by a judicial consultant, which turned out to be nothing more than a server in his shoe cupboard. He was put in a trap but he made a trap for the rest of the world.

Nobody could hold out forever. I was the one who finally came to witness his apprehension and sign the papers. After he had been sedated, a parade of carts arrived to disassemble his possessions and transfer them to storage. My father’s inventions, complete and incomplete, unpatented, had gone along with the silverware and the bedding.

The machines had made their return. In recent years, my father had been housed in a modest facility for the aged, some distance from the city and on the other side of Nujoma Location, where I had visited him the day before my assignment. I knew the place better than I wanted to, a yellow brick building with green corridors. Apart from the spacious lounges on the ground floor, it was as crowded as an albino slum. The residents occupied individual cells, sixteen to a floor, four floors in all. The staff consisted of a platoon of medical carts.

Everything on these four upper floors was done for your own good. The air was recycled for your own good. The temperature was kept at seventy-five Fahrenheit, day or night, for the good of the body, in the middle of winter and in the slow months of summer. Everything possible was done for your comfort and protection, consistent with the Constitution. Your body was dealt with for your own good. Your teeth might be taken out in your sleep, in the comfort and protection of your own bed, by an automatic dentist. They might be offered back to you encased in a plastic plinth, reminding you of a fly caught in a tablet of amber, but they had been unnecessary since you first came through the doors of the group home.

The food, after all, was restricted to a healthy greenhouse paste, having the consistency of marzipan and the paradoxical smell of prawns. Several breeds of dog, the kinds which had been lucky to make it into the mines, were assigned to the inhabitants on account of their positive emotional effects. Township specials and Rhodesian ridgebacks, trembling greyhounds and terriers descended from the kennels of long-forgotten madams who once ruled this part of the world. The smaller dogs were the more striking. They roamed the halls and common areas, pounced on the carts, curled up in baskets in rooms and looked with their grapey eyes on gold-framed holograms in which every face had been forgotten.

Exercise was prescribed in the walled-in garden because it was good for you. Blood pressure and heart rate were monitored, however, by the second. Red lights would flash and carts would go skating down the corridors when there was even the hint of trouble. In Abacha Reef Home, you were kept as safe as humanly possible—assuming it is safe to be bored out of your wits.

The building seemed deserted apart from the dogs sprawled on the lawn. The security system signed us in at the door. The lounges were empty.

In his cubicle, on the fourth floor, my father was bent over a cart. He had pried open the side panel to reveal the internal mechanism. I watched as he took a screwdriver lying on top of the cart, lit the hissing white flame on its head, and poked it here and there amid the circuitry. He was following a diagram spread out on the floor. His blue overalls were spotless. His curls had turned swan white.

“Should you be doing that?”

“Young man, you are perfectly correct. I should not be. I was merely teaching it to play chess.” He stood up and switched off the screwdriver, pretending to blow it out. “Are you from the League, perhaps?”

“The League?”

“The League for the Defense of Individual Rights and Responsibilities. Come to save me from everybody who wants to save me from myself.”

The cart came to life, set off a warning bell, and flashed frantic orange-and-red lights around its body. It bumped into me, scurried under the bed, and ran headlong into the wall where smoke came billowing out of its casing. I could hear it whirring here and there, clicking under its breath.

After a minute it nosed its way into the passage, between the feet of Lucan, and disappeared. I thought it had put a hand in my pocket but I didn’t want to look for fear of alerting my new superior officer. I thought it must be a holograph of my sister which my father didn’t want around anymore.

I said, “For argument’s sake, let’s assume that I’m from the League.”

“I hoped you would get here earlier.”

“We go where we’re most needed.”

“I have filed over a hundred petitions for constitutional relief from age-based persecution. I’ll find them for you. They’ll be important for your legal argument.”

But he didn’t look. Instead, my father sat down in a wicker chair, part of a pair beside the window. He took off his slippers and placed them underneath the chair.

Lucan left us alone. My father looked confused to see him go. The deterioration was evident. He was worse than the time before, much worse than he had been before my sister, much worse than I remembered him from a few weeks before. The lines in his forehead were deeper. His eyes circled unsteadily behind his spectacles. For years, he had been unable to follow the thread of a conversation very long. He would start, and start again, repeatedly lose the thread. On the other hand, he could work on a cart, or any type of device, for many hours without losing his concentration.

“So you’ve been altering the machines?”

“Who told you about that?”

“I saw two of the carts playing poker on the stairs. I see you have tools on you.”

He looked slyly at me. Put his bare feet into a small tub on the floor, opened the taps, leant back, and let the hot water wash up to his ankles. When it was full, he poured bubble bath into the water.

“All the games. All the games. Which ones already? Which ones have I done and been done with? Go. Backgammon. Chess. Monopoly. I have programmed them to perfection. These devices have a lot of time to spare. I figure they should have a pastime.” He adjusted his wedding ring, turning it once or twice to loosen it. “I haven’t started the boxing yet. I want to train the upright machines to box. It’s not easy. My hands, you understand, are going before my brain. Some days they won’t keep steady.”

I didn’t need to say much around my father. If it wasn’t about the Constitution, he would talk about his contraptions, getting up to show something in action or put it in your hand—an artificial butterfly, say, which would settle on the ceiling, or a quantum interferometer in the guise of a mercury thermometer, a fourteen-inch-tall android designed to win arguments on any topic, or an automatic kettle, containing modified blue-green algae, brewing blue-green tea or coffee from the spores.

None of his contraptions made any real money. And to be fair, it wasn’t the right time to be an inventor. We borrowed our ideas, defined them according to the energy required to copy the blueprints from another epoch. We copied fashions and literatures, legal doctrines, the political beliefs of better centuries, and even our top twenty hits. We didn’t need—we didn’t think we needed—authors, inventors, composers. For my father, it was different. Each one of his creations was like a prank. He was playing jokes on the universe.

At some point he paused and looked up from his explanation. His face, weathered to the bone, was as bright as a coin.

“Do you know, my friend, we have been conversing for almost an hour and I must confess, I have not been altogether honest with you.”

“In what way?”

“I have not told you that you remind me of someone. You really remind me of somebody familiar.”

I looked away to hide whatever was in my eyes. He took his feet out of the bath and dried them fussily. In the distance, across the river and over the train lines, a rocket was being prepared for launch. The automatic cranes were withdrawing from the sides. Steam rolled out of the engines. The sky was lined with golden haze.

By the time I looked back, my father had returned to his wedding ring, trying to take it off.

“Who is it?”

“Who’s what, if you please?”

I asked, “Of whom do I remind you?”

“I didn’t say that. I didn’t say you reminded me. Of whom? Of whom? You speak with such formality for a young gentleman. I wonder who you get it from. But, since you mention it, I have a very strong sense of déjà vu today. Young man, would you pass me a towel from over there so I can dry my feet?”

I was no closer to figuring out, from anything he said or had in his room, who on Earth or in the heavens below had gotten me in their mousetrap. I don’t think my father minded when I left. I was eager to get out of the building. It wasn’t until I was alone a corner of the limousine that I pulled out the postcard deposited in my pocket by the cart and read the words printed on it:

Beware of treason. Beware. Beware.