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an unimaginable futurity—refuted Malley’s Theory of Everything, which had been based on the hitherto impregnable Standard Model finite-universe cosmology. But Malley’s was still the only theory we had. It fitted all the data, except the irrefragable fact of the probe. Within the limits of our engineering, the theory still worked. Nobody had come up with anything to replace it. (This was a sore point with me. I sometimes thought it reflected badly on our society: perhaps, after all, it does take some fundamental social insecurity to sharpen the wits of genius. Perhaps we had no more chance of developing further fundamental physics than the Pacific Islanders had of developing the steam engine. Or—I hoped—it could just be that a Newton, an Einstein or a Malley doesn’t come along very often.)
    I suspected that Malley would have been an Outwarder himself, but he never made it to space. America’s last launch sites were already being stormed by mobs who thought rockets damaged the ozone layer, or made holes in the crystal spheres of the firmament. He fled America for Japan, and then quixotically returned to England at the time of the Green Death, where he worked to the best of his growing ability and dwindling resources as a medicine man, dealing out antibiotics and antigeriatrics to superstitious
settlers and nostalgic refugees, administering the telomere hack to frightened adolescents who understood it, if at all, as yet another rite-of-passage ordeal. We knew he’d survived the century of barbarism, and that he’d registered to vote in the elections that formally abolished capitalism and established the Solar Union. Evidently he’d voted against the social revolution, because in the subsequent century of the world commonwealth he had retreated to the wilds of London, a stubborn non-cooperator.
    We badly needed his cooperation now.
     
     
    Malley was apparently following the Epicurean injunction to ‘live unknown’. Suze had never heard so much as a rumour of him.
    ‘Would you like me to come with you, at least part of the way?’ she suggested. ‘I could help you find your way around, and you could—well, to be honest there are places I’d rather not go on my own.’
    ‘Yes, I’d like that very much,’ I said. ‘That’s real neighbourly of you, Suze.’
    She gave me a full-beam smile and asked, ‘How do you expect to track him down? Do you have any idea where he is? And why do you want to talk to him, anyway? If you don’t mind me asking.’
    I scratched my ear and looked out of the window. We were again above some low cloud, and through its dazzling white a town rose on our left. ‘Swindon tower,’ Suze remarked. Ahead of us the airship’s shadow raced like a rippling fluke across the contours of the clouds. I looked back at Suze.
    ‘No, I don’t mind you asking,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you the answers once we have a bit more privacy. And then, it’ll be up to you whether you want to come along with me or not.’
    ‘That’s OK,’ she said.
    ‘Tell me what you’ve found out about London,’ I said, and she did. By the time she had finished, we were almost there. We looked out at woodlands and marshes, ruins and the traces of streets and arterial roads, at the junctions of which smoke drifted up from the chimneys of huddled settlements. Suze began excitedly pointing out landmarks: Heathrow airport, its hexagram of runways only visible from the air, like the sigil of some ancient cult addressed to gods in the sky; the Thames Flood Barrier far to the east, a lonely line of silver dots in the Thames flood plain; Hyde Park with its historic Speaker’s Corner, where the Memorial to the Unknown Socialist rose a hundred metres above the trees, gazing in the disdain of victory at the fallen or falling towers of the City; and, as the airship turned and began to drift lower, our destination, the proud pylons of Alexandra Port.
    The sight of Alexandra Port set the hairs of my nape prickling. It had