“Where . . . what . . .” John began.
“Attention!” the man said.
“Sir!” John barked, bracing. Six years of Probationer schooling had made that a reflex.
“At ease, son,” the dark man said, and smiled. “Just helping you get a grip on yourself. First, don’t worry. This is real”—he gestured around at the room—”but it isn’t physical. You’re still touching the meteorite in the crate. Virtually no time is passing in the . . . the outside world. When we’ve finished talking, you’ll be back on the dock and none the worse for wear.”
“Am I crazy?” John blurted.
“No. You’ve just had something very strange happen.” The smile grew wry. “Pretty much the same thing happened to me, lad. A long time ago, when I wasn’t all that much older than you are now. Sit.”
John sank gingerly into one of the chairs. It was comfortable, old leather that sighed under his weight. He sat with his feet on the floor and his hands on the arms of the chair.
“My name’s Raj Whitehall, by the way. And this”—he waved a hand at the room—”is Center. A computer.”
Despite the terror that boiled somewhere at the back of his mind, John shaped a silent whistle. “A computer? Like the Ancestors had, the Federation? I’ve read a lot about them, sir.”
Raj Whitehall chuckled. “Well, that’s a good start. My people thought they were angels. Yes, Center’s a holdover from the First Federation. Military computer, Command and Control type. Don’t ask me any of the details. Where I was brought up, experts understood steam engines, a little. Look there.”
John turned his head to look at the mirrored surface. Instead, he was staring out into a landscape. It wasn’t a picture; there was depth and texture to it. Subtly different from anything he’d ever seen, the moons in the faded blue sky were the wrong size and number, the sunlight was a different shade. It cast black shadows across eroded gullies in cream-white silt. Out of the badlands came a column of men in uniforms like Raj’s. They were riding, but not on horses. On dogs, giant dogs five feet high at the shoulder. They looked a lot like Vulf, except their legs were thicker in proportion. John whistled again, this time aloud.
The column of men went by, and a clumsy-looking field gun pulled by six more of the giant dogs. Then Raj Whitehall pulled up his . . . well, his giant hound. A woman rode beside him, not in uniform. Her face was dusty and streaked with sweat, and beautiful. Slanted green eyes glowed out of it.
The vision faded, back to the absolutely perfect mirror. John looked back to Raj. “Where was that?” he said. Then, slowly: “When was that?”
Raj nodded, leaning his hips back against the table and crossing his arms. “That was Bellevue, the planet where I was born. About a hundred and fifty years ago.”
“You’re . . . a ghost?”
“A ghost in a machine. A recording that thinks its a man. It’s a convincing illusion, even to me.”
John sat silently for what felt like a minute. “Why are you talking to me?”
“Good lad,” Raj said. John felt an obscure jolt of pride at the praise. Raj went on. “Now, listen carefully. You know how the Federation collapsed?”
John nodded. Visager had preserved the records; he’d seen them in school. Expansion from Earth, then rivalries and civil war. Civil war that continued until the Tanaki Nets were destroyed and interstellar travel cut off, and then on Visager itself until civilization was thoroughly smashed. After that a long process of rebirth, slow and painful.
“That happened all over the human-settled galaxy. On Bellevue, the collapse was even worse than here. Center was left in the rubble underneath the planetary governor’s mansion. Center waited a long, long time for the time to be right. More than a thousand years; then it found me. Bellevue’s problem was internal division. We were set to slag ourselves down again, this time right back to stone hatchets, all the more surely because we were doing it with rifles and not nukes. I was a soldier, an officer. With Center’s help—and some very brave men—I reunited the planet. Bellevue’s the capital of the Second Federation, now.”