Manhattan in Reverse
neither ignorant, nor stupid. We believe technology as sophisticated as ours should be used as a safety net for our lives, not as an integral part, or ruler, as you choose. The simple way we live allows us to return to nature without having to endure the struggle and squalor of the actual stone age. For all things there is a balance, and you have got it badly wrong. Your society is exploiting the universe, not living in harmony with it. The way we live allows our minds to prosper, not our greed.’
    ‘While the way we live allows dreams to become reality. We are a race without limits.’
    ‘Without physical limits. What use is that, Edward? What is the ultimate reason to give everyone the power of a god? Look at you, what you’re doing – you hoard entire planets in readiness for the day when you can dismantle them and fabricate something in their place. What? What can possibly need building on such a scale? Explore the universe by all means, I’m sure there are miracles and marvels out there just as great as the one we’ve created for ourselves. But at the end of the day, you should come home to your family and your friends. That’s what’s truly important.’
    ‘I’m glad you’ve found a way to live with what we’ve achieved. But you’re in a minority. The rest of us want to grab the opportunity this time has gifted us with.’
    ‘You’ll learn,’ she said. ‘After all, you’ve got eternity.’

    FIVE
     
    EARTH ORBIT AD 2000
     
    My flyer ripped up through the ionosphere like a fish leaving water. The gravitonic and magnetic flux lines which knotted around the little craft tugged a braided haze of auroral streamers out behind us, looking for all the world like some ancient chemical rocket exhaust. Once clear of the atmosphere’s bulk, I increased the acceleration to twenty gees, and the slender scintillating strand was stretched to breaking point. Wispy photonic serpents writhed back down towards the planet as we burst free.
    I extended my perceptual range, tracking the multitude of flyers falling in and out of the atmosphere all around me. They blossomed like silver comets across my consciousness, dense currents of them arching up from the Earth in a series of flowing hoops with every apex reaching precisely six hundred miles above the equator. The portal Necklace itself, which occupied that orbit, was visualized by nodes of cool jade light sitting atop the hoops. Each of them was nested at the centre of a subtle spatial distortion, lensing the light outwards in curving ephemeral petals.
    The flyer soared round in a flat curve, merging with the traffic stream that was heading for the Tangsham portal a thousand miles ahead of me. Africa’s eastern coastline drifted past below, its visual clarity taking on a dreamlike quality, perfectly resolved yet impossibly distant. I watched it dwindle behind the flyer as all the wretched old emotions rose to haunt me again. Although I’d never quite had the courage to deactivate the Justin Ascham Raleigh file in the wake of the debacle which was Christine’s memory retrieval, I’d certainly abandoned it in my own mind. I couldn’t even remember giving my cybershadow the order to tag all the old suspects and watch for any status change within the global dataspace.
    Yet when the information slipped into my mind as I awoke that morning I knew I could never ignore it. Whatever would Francis have said?
    I kept the flyer’s forward perception primary as we approached the portal. The circle of exotic matter had a breadth of nine hundred yards, the rim of a chasm that could be seen only from one direction. Its pseudofabric walls glowed green where they intersected the boundaries of normal space-time, forming a tunnel that stretched off into middle-distance. Two lanes of flyers sped along its interior in opposite directions, carrying people to their new world and their hoped-for happiness.
    I wished them well, for the next portal led to Nibeza, one of the

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