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enough, but even our politics had weathered and softened into non-lethality, like a rusty artillery piece in a mossy emplacement—all our destructive power was directed outwards.
    I decided that, whether her presence was fortuitous, or the outcome of one of those hidden forces whose existence she’d so naively denied, I couldn’t lose. If she was innocent, then I’d gain some valuable contacts and information—if not, the only way to find out was by playing along.
    So I said: ‘Hmm, that’s interesting. Do you know many non-cooperators?’ (That was the polite term; the others included ‘parasites’, ‘scabs’, ‘scum’, and—spoken with a sneer and a pretend spit—‘bankers’.) It was considered all right to exchange coins with them for their odd handicrafts and eccentric nanofactures, and to employ them as guides—but most people shrank from any closer contact, as if the non-cos carried some invisible skin disease.
    ‘A few,’ she said, looking relieved. ‘I’m studying, you know, trade patterns in the Thames Valley.’
    ‘Trade patterns?’
    ‘Most people think the non-cos live by scrounging stuff from the Union, but that’s just a prejudice.’ She grimaced; she was still talking in a low voice, as if not wanting the other passengers to overhear. ‘Actually they’re pretty self-sufficient. They make things and swap them among themselves, using little metal weights for indirect swaps. That’s why whenever they offer to do things for tourists, they only do it for metal weights.’ Suze laughed. ‘There I go again. I’m sure you know all this.’
    ‘Well, in theory,’ I admitted, ‘but it’ll be interesting to see how it works in practice. The fact is, I’m going to London to find—a certain person.’ I thought about risks. I’d be making inquiries after this guy as soon as we landed, among all kinds of people. No matter how discreet I was about it, word would get around. There seemed to be no harm in starting now. ‘His name is Isambard Kingdom Malley.’
    ‘He’s alive ?’ Suze sounded incredulous. ‘In London?’ Comprehension dawned on her face.
    ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He’s a non-co.’
     
     
    Isambard Kingdom Malley was, or had been, a physicist. He worked out the Theory of Everything. The final equations. When I was as young as I
look, there was a fashion for tee shirts with the Malley equations on them. TOE shirts, we called them. The equations, at least, were elegant.
    Malley was born in 2039, so he was six years old at the time of the Fall Revolution. His theory was born in the early 2060s, in the brief surge of new technologies and research advances that marked the period when the US/UN empire had fallen, but the barbarians had not yet won. His last paper was the modest classic Space-time manipulation with non-exotic matter , Malley, I K, Phys. Rev. D 128 (10), 3182 (2080). It established the theoretical possibility of the quantum-chaotic wormhole and the vacuum-fluctuation virtual-mass drive. Its celebrated ‘Appendix II: Engineering Considerations’ pointed out some practical problems with constructing the Gate and the Drive, notably that it would require about a billion times as much computational power as was currently available.
    A week after the article’s publication, the journal was shut down by the gang in charge of its local fragment of the Former United States, for ‘un-Scriptural physical speculation’, ‘blasphemy’, and (according to some sources) ‘witchcraft’. There’s a certain elegiac aptness in the thought that the paper which pointed the road to the stars was published in what turned out to be the journal’s final issue: the West was still soaring when it fell.
    Thirteen years later, the Outwarders built the wormhole gate and torched off their interstellar probe, reaching for the end of space and time. That it never did reach the expected end—that it was, in fact, still going strong, still transmitting almost incomprehensible data from